Abstract
Scholars have demonstrated that governments allow citizens to express their opinions and selectively respond to them, yet little is known about how local governments interact with netizens via social media. In this paper, we measure government responsiveness based on whether the government verbally responds to public environmental complaints on social media. Using crawled real-world interactions between citizens and governments on Weibo (a Twitter-like platform), we find that higher bargaining power is associated with a lower likelihood that the government will respond to an environmental complaint against a firm. Local governments in China are more likely to respond to appeals that are likely to attract the attention of the upper-level government. Moreover, involving upper-level government through social media can weaken the bargaining power of industrial giants. Finally, public complaints have a significant short-term impact on corporate environmental performance but have a limited effect on firms with high bargaining power.
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Notes
See http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2014-04/25/content_2666328.htm for the new Environmental Protection Law of the People's Republic of China issued in 2014.
Localized management is one of the basic features of China's administrative management system, that is, county-level governments are required to take full responsibility for local environmental management.
A prefecture-level city in China has an average of five counties.
Since 1992, China has successively introduced a number of air pollution prevention and control policies, the main object of which is SO2.
We use an alternative measure for nonresponses as a robustness check (see Table 10 in the appendix). We also conduct a robustness check by dropping nonresponses (see Tables 11 and 12 in the appendix). Due to the limited number of observations leading to low power, some of the variables are no longer statistically significant, but the signs of the coefficients remain the same as our previous model.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72004024, 71825005 and 72161147002) and Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative project EfD MS-519.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Tables
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12 and Figs.
Screenshot of public appeal
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Screenshot of government response
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Number of complaints/responses and response rate by public promotion
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Number of complaints/responses and response rate by output ratio
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Wang, Q., Liu, M., Xu, J. et al. Blow the Lid Off: Public Complaints, Bargaining Power, and Government Responsiveness on Social Media. Environ Resource Econ 85, 133–166 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-023-00761-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-023-00761-x