Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China
Few political systems are completely closed to citizen participation, but in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, such participation may come with risks. In these contexts where fear and uncertainty may be high, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities?...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Springer US
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117467 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-4655 |
| _version_ | 1826191293110288384 |
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| author | Xu, Yiqing Tsai, Lily L |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science Xu, Yiqing Tsai, Lily L |
| author_sort | Xu, Yiqing |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Few political systems are completely closed to citizen participation, but in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, such participation may come with risks. In these contexts where fear and uncertainty may be high, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities? The resource mobilization model identifies the importance of time, money, and civic skills as resources that are necessary for participation. In this paper, we build on this model and argue that political connections—close personal ties to someone working in government—can also constitute a critical resource, especially in contexts with weak democratic institutions. Using data from both urban and rural China, we find that individuals with political connections are more likely to contact authorities with complaints about government public services, despite the fact that they do not have higher levels of dissatisfaction with public service provision. We conduct various robustness checks, including a sensitivity analysis, and show that this relationship is unlikely to be driven by an incorrect model specification or unobserved confounding variables. Keywords: Authoritarianism, Complaint making, State-society relations, Political connections, Political participation, Resource model |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:53:57Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/117467 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:53:57Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | Springer US |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1174672022-09-26T09:02:20Z Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China Xu, Yiqing Tsai, Lily L Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science Tsai, Lily L Few political systems are completely closed to citizen participation, but in nondemocratic systems and developing democracies, such participation may come with risks. In these contexts where fear and uncertainty may be high, why do some citizens still take action and make complaints to authorities? The resource mobilization model identifies the importance of time, money, and civic skills as resources that are necessary for participation. In this paper, we build on this model and argue that political connections—close personal ties to someone working in government—can also constitute a critical resource, especially in contexts with weak democratic institutions. Using data from both urban and rural China, we find that individuals with political connections are more likely to contact authorities with complaints about government public services, despite the fact that they do not have higher levels of dissatisfaction with public service provision. We conduct various robustness checks, including a sensitivity analysis, and show that this relationship is unlikely to be driven by an incorrect model specification or unobserved confounding variables. Keywords: Authoritarianism, Complaint making, State-society relations, Political connections, Political participation, Resource model 2018-08-22T15:10:12Z 2018-08-22T15:10:12Z 2017-07 2018-08-18T03:40:19Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0190-9320 1573-6687 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117467 Tsai, Lily L., and Yiqing Xu. “Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China.” Political Behavior, vol. 40, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 629–57. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-4655 en https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9416-6 Political Behavior Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Springer Science+Business Media, LLC application/pdf Springer US Springer US |
| spellingShingle | Xu, Yiqing Tsai, Lily L Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title | Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title_full | Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title_fullStr | Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title_full_unstemmed | Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title_short | Outspoken Insiders: Political Connections and Citizen Participation in Authoritarian China |
| title_sort | outspoken insiders political connections and citizen participation in authoritarian china |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117467 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-4655 |
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