Browsing by Subject "Responsiveness"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access "All of My Business": Governmental Social Media and Authoritarian Responsiveness(2017) Liu, ChuanHow would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.
Item Open Access Responses and Replies: Bureaucrats and Differential Responsiveness to Citizen Demands in China(2021) Zhang, LinchuanWhich demands are more likely to elicit substantive responses from governments that are not electorally accountable? This study analyzes factors affecting the degree of government responsiveness to citizen demands in China. Based upon information-gathering theory and features of the hierarchical bureaucratic system, I build a three-actor (government leaders, government functionaries, and ordinary citizens) framework to disaggregate local government in China and consider the difference in the degree of responsiveness from the perspective of government functionaries actually responding (or not responding) to citizen demands. I argue that the degree of attentiveness from functionaries (the clarity of the demand), the incentives for functionaries to respond (upward accountability and the principal-agent problem), and the difficulty of responsiveness for functionaries (the difficulty of the demand) are three dimensions that can explain the differential responsiveness to citizen demands. Empirically, I establish a new measure of government responsiveness in China distinguishing substantive responses from negative and perfunctory replies. I exploit a random sample of an original dataset containing over 130,000 online demands and government replies in an online petition institution in a Chinese city to test hypotheses implied by my theory. Regression results show that (1) explicit demands are more likely to elicit substantive responses than vague demands; (2) demands that align with the agendas of government leaders are more likely to elicit substantive responses than other demands; and (3) demands that require more effort to satisfy are less likely to elicit substantive responses than other demands. This study enriches our understanding of government responsiveness by usefully complicating the conventional analytical view of authoritarian responsiveness in the existing literature. This study also provides insights into interactions between ordinary citizens and officials under quasi-democratic authoritarian institutions in the real world.