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The relationship of government responsiveness and public participation is an important issue of the opinion-policy nexus theory. Based on the "Leadership Message Board" 31 province of China, this study systematically investigated the effect of government responsiveness on public participation. The results find government responsiveness has a magnetic effect on public participation, and the response efficiency, response actors, and response discourse have different effects on public participation. Besides, response discourse has a moderating effect on the influence of high-level response and authoritative department response on public participation. This study provides a new perspective for understanding the governance logic of government responsiveness.

The issue of whether the internet promotes political participation has always been a hotly debated topic in academia. However, current research lacks an effective classification of the modes of internet use, and it does not analyze their effect on different forms of political participation. Based on data from the 2015 and 2018 waves of the China Urban Governance Survey, this study offers an examination of the internet usage behavior of Chinese urban netizens from the perspectives of internet involvement and information consumption, as well as comparing the impact that different modes of internet use have on conventional and unconventional political participation. The results of this study confirm the "citizen-empowerment hypothesis" of internet use, and show that the "group involvement–social-information-oriented" mode of internet use has a positive effect on the conventional and unconventional political participation of urban internet users. However, the study fails to support the "time-displacement hypothesis". It shows that the "individual involvement–entertainment-oriented" mode of internet use does not have a negative impact on the conventional and unconventional political participation of Chinese urban internet users. Similarly, the "group involvement–entertainment-oriented" mode of internet use has no significant effect on unconventional political participation. Taken together, the study shows that, in general, internet use has promoted the political participation of Chinese urban netizens, but there are significant differences between the different modes of internet use. As a revolutionary medium, the internet not only provides people with a convenient way of obtaining and communicating information, but also creates more challenges for state governance. The way in which the government should deal with different forms of political participation in the internet age will be an important research topic in the future.

Prior studies regard responsiveness as an effective institution for Chinese government to mitigate social protests based on the premise that citizens adopt more institutionalized channels as soon as the regime makes it available. We challenge this notion by arguing that institutionalized and noninstitutionalized channels are not substituting but complements, and improving responsiveness to institutionalized participation may ironically lead to more protests. We collected a unique dataset and employed machine-learning to measure the quality of local responsiveness. We find that improving responsiveness has a positive effect on protests and identify updating citizens' beliefs on repression as major mechanism. The findings suggest the availability of new institutionalized channels may not have the intended substitutive effects on noninstitutionalized participation, and thus authoritarian co-optation could have unintended consequences. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

AbstractPolitical leaders and elites play an enormous role in shaping a country's political development. Participatory and deliberative governance represents a major trend of political development around the world; while many studies focus on the ordinary people involved in public deliberation, little is known about the roles elites play in facilitating or impeding the progress of this deliberation. Utilizing a new survey on Chinese officials, we offer the first empirical study that reveals Chinese officials' perceptions and practices of deliberative democracy. We find that cultural and political traditions alongside personal and social factors have deeply shaped elites' understandings of democracy, especially the new socialist deliberative democracy. Chinese officials understand democracy largely according to the Confucian tradition ofminbenand the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) political heritage ofmass line, both of which emphasize that officials should listen to the people and make benevolent policies for them. While many embrace the significance of deliberative institutions for improving democratic governance, others emphasize the pragmatic value of consolidating the status quo, or believe it is merely a political show. Democratic oriented officials in the Chinese sense – those who view themselves as servants of the people who should respond to their needs, value public input, are willing to converse with the people in an equal manner, and are less concerned about risks in social stability – are more likely to engage the public in daily decision-making through various channels. Our study suggests that different practices of authoritarian deliberation may lead toward distinct prospects for democracy.

The link between geographical leadership mobility and policy isomorphism is rarely discussed in the extant literature. We argue that the geographical leadership mobility encourages local executives to converge their development experiences in their original working jurisdictions and their current positions. The distinct Chinese political personnel system provides an ideal environment that allows researchers to examine the isomorphic effects of geographical leadership mobility. This research builds a dataset of local social spending between 1998 and 2011 as well as a database of the leadership mobility history of provincial executives in China. Results of the spatial panel analysis (SPA) demonstrate that the geographical leadership mobility (i.e., horizontal, top‐down, and bottom‐up) of governors stimulates the regional isomorphism of provincial education and health care spending. The empirical findings affirm the effectiveness of the effort of the Chinese central government in narrowing the regional inequality of social welfare provision through the geographical mobility of local leadership.

Abstract
Research suggests that economic inequality reduces political trust after the public recognizes the inequality and perceives it as a failure of the political system in Western democracies. This study challenges this presumed "output evaluation model" (OEM) both theoretically and empirically. We provide an alternative mediator evaluation model (MEM) contending that objective inequality affects political trust through government-performance mediators, without requiring accurate public perception of inequality or specific regime types. With nationwide economic inequality and public opinion data from China, we examined both the OEM implication and four MEM mechanisms through impartial governance, responsiveness, judicial fairness, and anti-corruption efforts. Findings indicate that the mediating mechanisms, rather than direct inequality, shape political trust, with robust evidence even after addressing endogeneity. This study broadens the understanding of the intricate relationship between systemic conditions and individual perceptions, offering significant insights into the dynamics of trust in political institutions in a general sense.