Abstract
Why do Chinese governments at various levels set up public complaint websites where citizen petitions and government responses can be reviewed by the general public? We argue that it is the result of two factors: strong signals sent by the central government to improve governance, and the availability of new technologies to promote policy innovation. To impress their superiors, local officials adopted newly available commercial technology to innovate existing citizen feedback systems, which presented a developmental trajectory from “openness,” “integration,” to “big data-driven prediction.” Drawing on policy documents and interviews with local politicians and administrators, we provide a chronological perspective of how technical development, central government’s signals and local decision-making have interacted in the past two decades to bring forth today’s public complaint websites. The contingent and non-teleological nature of this development can also be applied to other policies such as the social credit system.
Highlights
Government websites are a treasure trove of information about public grievances
Why do officials publish a large volume of unedited citizen complaints, which reflect negatively on local administrative performance, online? Second, why have they chosen to do so without an explicit mandate from the central government? What is remarkable about public complaint websites is not so much the fact that politicians seek feedback from the populace – after all, bureaus of letters and visits have existed since the 1950s – but that such exchanges are published openly
Why have local officials voluntarily initiated accountability mechanisms that subject their administration to public scrutiny?
Summary
Government websites are a treasure trove of information about public grievances. Citizens contact officials to complain about issues as diverse as bad traffic, noise pollution, broken elevators, soaring pork prices, owed wages, police brutality, abusive teachers, or the sale of cocaine in a rural karaoke parlour. Several years after these developments began at the local level, the central government began extending virtual interactions between officials and citizens from websites to social media.
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