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Is Consultation the “New Normal?”: Online Policymaking and Governance Reform in China

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Abstract

Governance reform has emerged as an element of the Chinese Communst Party’s development strategy in the era of the “new normal.” This article examines the implementation of online consultation, a prominent instrument of governance reform—institutionalized under Hu Jintao and championed by Xi Jinping—in which officials provide interested parties with opportunities to offer feedback on proposed public policies. The research assembles original data regarding the online consultation practices of more than one hundred central government ministries and provincial governments. The analysis demonstrates that online consultation practices are more developed in provincial governments than central government ministries. Online consultation is more advanced in the disclosure of proposed policies than in the circulation of feedback submitted in response to draft laws and regulations. Finally, online consultation is primarily utilized by organizations with substantial resources, as well as organizations operating in environments not characterized by fundamental political sensitivities. These results suggest that, within well-specified limits, online consultation increases information disclosure and public participation in government decision making and, therefore, holds promise as a Party-led, incremental administrative response to the governance challenges of China’s “new normal.”

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Notes

  1. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-growth-annual.

  2. Consultation is distinct from deliberation. Consultation entails government notice of an intended action and an accompanying request for citizen feedback. Deliberation, by contrast, involves discussion among interested parties and collective decision making.

  3. For simplicity, government organizations of all types, such as agencies, bureaus, and commissions, are referred to as ministries, except in contexts in which such organizational distinctions are salient.

  4. http://www.china.org.cn/china/fourth_plenary_session/node_7214095.htm.

  5. This analysis is distinctive in its specific focus on online consultation. Previous research has appraised Chinese government websites with respect to information disclosure and public participation more generally [14, 21, 42].

  6. All coding decisions were arrived at via consensus among the author and a research assistant.

  7. Subsequent research, using the methodology described below, can investigate the development of online consultation during the later years of Xi Jinping’s presidency.

  8. Some ministries and governments catalog online consultation, either in addition to or in lieu of organization websites, via the website of the State Council Legislative Affairs Office (SCLAO) (http://www.chinalaw.gov.cn/). For each ministry and government, both the organization website and the SCLAO website were examined for evidence of online consultation.

  9. An additional eight websites contain links suggestive of online consultation. These links, however, are devoid of content or cannot be opened at all. In the absence of confirmation of the circulation of policy drafts and solicitation of citizen feedback, these organizations are coded as not having utilized online consultation.

  10. The information on ministry and government websites is in some instances not sufficiently detailed to identify the earliest online consultation or the number of consultations that have been conducted.

  11. It is not necessarily the case that such ministries and governments post to their websites all comments that are submitted during all online consultations.

  12. The municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai are the administrative equivalents of provinces, in that they are first-tier jurisdictions that report directly to the central government. These jurisdictions, along with the municipalities of Chongqing and Tianjin, are included in the analysis.

  13. Although evidence from case studies indicates that comments have affected the development of particular policies (Ford 2012), systematic evidence on the impact of citizen feedback does not yet exist.

  14. Official government statistics are distributed by sources such as the China Data Center at the University of Michigan (http://chinadatacenter.org/), All China Market Research Company (http://www.acmr.com.cn/en/#), and China Statistical Yearbooks Database (http://tongji.cnki.net/overseas/brief/result.aspx).

  15. When the analysis is restricted to State Council cabinet-level ministries and commissions (i.e., organizations performing alternative, subsidiary functions are eliminated), the percent of central government organizations that have adopted online consultation is similar to the percent for provincial governments.

  16. In this comparison, the median is utilized as the basis of identifying the typical central government ministry and provincial government. The mean number of online consultations conducted by central government ministries is substantially influenced by the presence of two outlying organizations—the Ministry of Commerce and the China Food and Drug Administration—that have each completed in excess of four hundred consultations. No other central government ministry has initiated more than 137 online consultations, and no provincial government has conducted more than 163 consultations.

  17. Other aspects of the institutional character of online consultation are not examined because of limited variation across governments. For example, twenty of the 21 adopting governments post to the Internet the full texts of draft laws and regulations, and 19 of these governments do not offer public responses to feedback submitted in response to proposed policies.

  18. There are 31 jurisdictions included in the analysis, 21 of which have implemented online consultation. These jurisdictions—all of which report directly to the central government—are 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and four municipalities.

  19. Similar results hold for urbanicity, in that the utilization and institutional character of online consultation are more developed in relatively urban provinces than in more rural locations.

  20. The larger number of central government ministries (107), relative to provincial governments, makes regression analysis feasible, although the number of observations is small by standards of maximum likelihood estimation.

  21. This variable is coded 1 for State Council cabinet-level ministries and commissions (e.g., Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education, Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Science and Technology) and coded 0 for organizations directly under the State Council (e.g., General Administration of Customs, State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television), administrations and bureaus under cabinet-level ministries and commissions (e.g., State Bureau of Letters and Calls, State Administration of Grain), administrative offices under the State Council (e.g., Overseas Chinese Affairs Office), institutions directly under the State Council (e.g., Xinhua News Agency, Chinese Academy of Social Science, China Banking Regulatory Commission), special organizations directly under the State Council (e.g., State Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission), and State Council organizational and coordination procedural bodies.

  22. Information about central government expenditures is available at www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2013/html/Z0903E.xls. For each organization, expenditures in the policy area in which the organization operates are divided by total expenditures.

  23. To assess the substantive significance of the association between organization type and online consultation, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted. In these simulations, the explanatory variables other than the indicator of whether the organization is a cabinet-level department were held constant at their mode or mean.

  24. Given the limited number of central government ministries that have implemented online consultation (36), regression analysis is eschewed in favor of bivariate comparisons across types of adopting organizations.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Jing Chen, Bruce Dickson, Greg Distelhorst, Sujian Guo, Yue Hou, Min Jiang, Randy Kluver, Nele Noesselt, Christoph Steinhardt, and participants at the conference on “The Empirical Study of Agency Rulemaking” held on February 20, 2015 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the 13th Chinese Internet Research Conference held on May 27-28, 2015 at the University of Alberta, the 29th annual meeting and international symposium of the Association of Chinese Political Science held on October 10-11, 2016 at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and the international workshop on “China’s ‘New Normal’: Politics, Economic Reforms and Political Philosophy” held on December 1-3, 2016 at the University of Duisburg-Essen for sharing information and insights that were helpful in conducting this research. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Elliott School of International Affairs, Regulatory Studies Center, and Sigur Center for Asian Studies, all at The George Washington University.

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  1. Department of Political Science, The George Washington University, Monroe Hall, Suite 440, 2115 G Street, Washington, DC, NW, 20052, USA

    Steven J. Balla

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Balla, S.J. Is Consultation the “New Normal?”: Online Policymaking and Governance Reform in China. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 22, 375–392 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-017-9484-9

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