My dissertation, titled Input Institutions in a Changing China, consists of three research papers which study the ways in which Chinese citizens interact with local government agencies and how this impacts their perceptions of regime legitimacy. I filed my final draft in April 2024, and it was approved the following May. Below are the chapter titles and abstracts as they appear in the official dissertation draft accepted at Berkeley; titles and abstracts may differ on the published versions.
Paper 1: “Contacting, Petitioning, and Satisfaction with Government Responsiveness: Nationwide Survey Evidence from China”
Chinese citizens have access to a wide range of institutional channels through which they can contact government officials to request help or make complaints. These institutions serve several functions, including collecting information on public preferences and giving an appearance of responsive governance. Using data from Wave 5 of the Asian Barometer Survey, which allows me to control for self-selection into political participation, I find no evidence that using these input channels improves Chinese citizens’ beliefs about government responsiveness. Petitioning leads to reduced satisfaction with government responsiveness, while contacting civil servants or elected officials has no effect. Beliefs about government responsiveness, however, do strongly influence respondents’ willingness to participate through these channels, irrespective of whether they do so.
This paper was accepted for publication in Asian Survey in Fall of 2024, and should soon be available online.
Paper 2: “When Responses Are Not Responsive: Explanatory Responsiveness as Performative Governance”
Studies of constituency service responsiveness tend to focus on material results: the person soliciting help either gets what they want, or gets turned away. While acknowledging the importance of this substantive responsiveness, I draw attention to the phenomenon of explanatory responses: those in which the government provides a detailed reply explaining why a more complete solution was not possible. Far from merely saying no with many words, these replies represent a channel through which government agencies can assuage disgruntled citizens even when they are unable to solve their problems. By studying the rhetoric which agencies deploy in these replies, we obtain a window into the way a government seeks to legitimize itself under public pressure. Drawing on a sample of 2,003 letter reply pairs on the Message Board for Leaders, I identify three common tactics in China’s explanatory responses: arguing back, providing context, and using the law as a shield. These tactics suggest that institutions like the Message Board for Leaders not only collect information about public preferences and provide stable alternatives to protest. They also serve a pedagogical role, teaching the public what it means to be a good citizen.
This manuscript served as my job market paper in the 2023-2024 hiring cycle. I also presented it at the 2024 Mobilization conference at SDSU.
Paper 3: “Law as a Shield: How Chinese Local Governments Use Legality to Deflect Public Pressure”
In this paper, I introduce the concept of “law as a shield.” This refers to a way in which state agents invoke laws, rules, and regulations to justify their actions, or to justify their inaction when faced with a problem. I illustrate this concept using quantitative and qualitative data from an original sample of more than 2,000 letters and replies submitted to China’s Message Board for Leaders, an online citizen service portal. The frequency of law as a shield, appearing in one out of seven replies, lends credence to the idea that Chinese state and party agencies increasingly use rule by law, or legality, as a source of legitimacy. This is true even as rule of law, genuine constraints on the central leadership, continues to erode. Though my data come from China, I see law as a shield as a much broader phenomenon, and review other literature which finds similar practices in liberal democracies.
