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Deliberation researchers have started to question the commonly assumed association between democracy and deliberation, arguing that public deliberation in authoritarian regimes is not only theoretically possible, but also empirically existent. Echoing their speculation that deliberation may lead China to different political trajectories, this study examines the political impacts of authoritarian consultation and deliberation by analyzing data from sample surveys conducted in multiple rural areas in Zhejiang province. The results show that both individuals' discursive experience and the level of discursive institutionalization have positive impacts on state legitimacy, and that deliberation tends to exert a stronger influence on promoting state legitimacy in an area with less fully developed discursive institutions. In contrast, individuals' discursive experience and institutional levels play far weaker roles in fostering citizenship characteristics. The implications of the findings for China's political future are discussed.Deliberation researchers have started to question the commonly assumed association between democracy and deliberation, arguing that public deliberation in authoritarian states is not only theoretically possible, but also empirically existent. Echoing their speculation that deliberation may lead China to different political trajectories, this study examines the political impacts of authoritarian consultation and deliberation by analyzing data from sample surveys conducted in multiple rural areas in Zhejiang province. The results show that both individuals' discursive experience and the level of discursive institutionalization have positive impacts on state legitimacy, and that deliberation tends to exert a stronger influence on promoting state legitimacy in an area with less fully developed discursive institutions. In contrast, individuals' discursive experience and institutional levels play far weaker roles in fostering citizenship characteristics. The implications of the findings for China's political future are discussed.

This article explores how an established environmental nongovernmental organization, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), engaged in data activism around a civic tech platform in China, expanding the space for public participation. By conducting participatory observation and interviews, along with document analysis, we describe three modes of data activism that represent different mechanisms of civic oversight in the environmental sphere. Unlike contentious data activism in the Western context, we argue that IPE activists' data practices are localized in the specific sociopolitical culture shaped by China's authoritarian system. These practices do not involve contentious political criticism against the government, although they have monitoring functions. By finding the middle ground between confrontation and state control, IPE activists participated in the political process as policy entrepreneurs who pursue their political goals in cooperation with the government. Rather than mobilizing radical contestation, environmental data activism in China works as a constructive alternative to the denial of the existing government system, transmitting public input into the policy-making process.

Taking different views into account is considered a virtue of democratic citizens. However, disagreement is often a barrier to deliberation. One reason is that individuals tend to impute biases to their adversaries and, on this basis, prepare for deliberation in less than optimal ways. Two experiments were conducted with results that supported this proposition. Specifically, encountering an incongruent opinion from another person led people to infer more bias in that person's reasoning and consequently, to be less willing to engage in subsequent discussion with that person, and to be less inclined of using deliberative strategies if they found themselves in the discussion. Furthermore, these deliberative choices were directly predicted by individuals' expectancy of their discussion partner's likely deliberativeness based on their perceptions of bias in the partner's reasoning. Together, the evidence suggests the operation of a cognitive bias blind spot that is likely to undermine individuals' preparation for deliberative engagement.