The Paradox of Responsive Authoritarianism: How Civic Activism Spurs Environmental Penalties in China

Christopher Marquis () and Yanhua Bird ()
Additional contact information
Christopher Marquis: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
Yanhua Bird: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02163

Organization Science, 2018, vol. 29, issue 5, 948-968

Abstract: Recognizing the need to better understand institutional change processes in authoritarian states, which play an increasingly prominent role in the world economy, we examine the efficacy of civic activism aimed at spurring governmental action concerning the environmental performance of firms in China. We highlight the paradox of “responsive authoritarianism” on display in China: to avoid needing to rule by coercion alone, the government seeks citizens’ feedback and tolerates pressures for change, but at the same time it resists the associated legitimacy threats regarding its capacity to rule. Local governments and the media play crucial and dual roles in this system: they mitigate change pressures from civic activism that takes place within the state’s systems, but they magnify change pressures from publicly visible civic activism occurring outside those systems. We test our conceptual model using a unique data set of environmental penalties imposed on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2007 to 2011. Our findings contribute to understanding processes of institutional change and outcomes of social movements.

Keywords: civic activism; authoritarianism; China; regulation; corporate sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1212 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ororsc:v:29:y:2018:i:5:p:948-968

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().