Do Authoritarian Governments Respond to Public Opinion on the Environment? Evidence from China

Xiao Tang, Weiwei Chen and Tian Wu
Additional contact information
Xiao Tang: School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Weiwei Chen: School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Tian Wu: School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: Given its serious impacts on the public’s health, air pollution in China is a matter of strong public concern, particularly in reference to malodorous waste gas. Petition letters related to atmospheric pollution accounted for about 40% of the total petition cases. However, scholarly views differ on whether the Chinese government responds to public opinion on the environment and seeks to improve its environmental governance behavior. For this study, data from national surveys on the public’s environmental satisfaction administered during the period 2011–2015 were analyzed to determine whether the public’s dissatisfaction with the state of the environment in a given year resulted in increased investments by provincial governments in pollution governance during the following year. The study’s findings revealed that governmental behavior in response to public opinion on the environment was selective within the field of environmental governance, with provincial governments being inclined to invest more in waste gas pollution control than in water pollution control. Furthermore, results from this study show that the Chinese government tends to put more efforts into the environmental field where it could more easily achieve short-term benefits.

Keywords: environmental governance; public opinion; governmental responsiveness; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/2/266/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/2/266/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:15:y:2018:i:2:p:266-:d:130175

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().