How effective is authoritarian environmentalism？ —evidence from China

Abstract

Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) in China is embedded in the historical evolution of political centralization and has obvious path dependence; however, its effectiveness lacks empirical evidence. In the light of the cognitive motivation theory and the corpus linguistics, this study uses the multigrain Chinese word segmentation algorithm to construct the will index of provincial and central governments' environmental governance. With this will index and the provincial panel data in China from 2004 to 2017, this paper systematically examines the effectiveness and spatial heterogeneity of AE with the System GMM method. First, there is a negative correlation between the central government's will for environmental governance and environmental quality in provincial administrative regions, and top–down AE, characterized by political centralization, is less effective in China. However, the interaction term coefficients between the central and provincial governments are significantly positive for environmental governance. Second, from the perspective of sub-regions, effectiveness shows spatial heterogeneity across Eastern, Central, and Western China. Third, in Chinese-style AE, the public's environmental appeal has not received sufficient attention, and people's participation in environmental governance is limited. Finally, this study discusses ways to improve Chinese-style AE in China's institutional context and political system.