Multilevel power structure and local compliance with government transparency mandates: evidence from China's environmental transparency reform
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523231167081 |
| Author | Jin Li,Shaowei Chen |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
Multilevel power structure
and local compliance with
government transparency
mandates: evidence from
China’s environmental
transparency reform
Jin Li
Central University of Finance and Economics, China
Shaowei Chen
Hunan University, China
Abstract
Despite the ample literature on government transparency, our knowledge about how
the vertical power structure of governments shapes local compliance with government
transparency mandates is still limited. This study sets out to address this gap. Specifically,
we investigate how the central government’s environmental information disclosure
(EID) signal and provincial governments’conflicting signal of economic growth affect,
independently and interactively, city governments’compliance with central EID man-
dates in the center-province-city hierarchical structure in China. We argue that the cen-
tral EID signal positively affects city compliance, while the provincial signal of economic
growth reduces it. Moreover, the provincial signal of economic growth negatively mod-
erates the impact of the central EID signal. Empirically, with a panel dataset for city-level
governments from 2008 to 2018, we found robust evidence strongly supporting our the-
oretical hypotheses.
Points for practitioners
This research reveals the influences of the complex dynamics among governments at dif-
ferent levels on local compliance with government transparency mandates. The findings
Corresponding author:
Shaowei Chen, School of Public Administration, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China.
Email: schen@hnu.edu.cn
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2024, Vol. 90(1) 82–99
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523231167081
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
suggest that the maneuvers of middle-level governments in a multilevel power structure
and the interactions among multiple conflicting policy goals should be taken seriously by
practitioners when designing policies to promote government transparency reforms.
Keywords
China, conflicting signals, environmental transparency, government transparency, multilevel
power structure
Introduction
Government transparency, which can be generally defined as the disclosure of informa-
tion about governments’workings or performance, among others, to the public at large
(Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney, 2017; Hood, 2007; Meijer, 2013) and is widely
deemed to be “the key to better governance”(Hood, 2007),
1
has been increasingly
emphasized across the globe during the past decades (Piña and Avellaneda, 2019).
Meanwhile, as with other policy initiatives formulated at the central level, the actual
effectiveness of the government transparency initiatives relies on the compliance at the
local level. Therefore, understanding the underlying forces shaping local behaviors in
information disclosure has become the focus of transparency research in public adminis-
tration and political science.
Scholars have proposed various mechanisms that might influence the transparency of
local governments. Generally, the perspectives adopted can be classified into two cat-
egories: the internal perspective that emphasizes the influences of organizational charac-
teristics and the external perspective that focuses on the impacts of external pressures.
Specifically, on the one hand, studies with the internal perspective suggest that a high-
level organizational capacity (e.g. fiscal resources, technical expertise, professionalism,
and leadership) and an internal organizational environment (organizational culture, ideol-
ogy, structure, and organization managers’attitudes towards transparency) conducive for
transparency are crucial conditions for local governments to promote transparency
(Bearfield and Bowman, 2016; Citro et al., 2021; Dragoşet al., 2012;
Grimmelikhuijsen and Feeney, 2017; Sol, 2013). On the other hand, taking the external
perspective, scholars highlight the influences of political competition (Bearfield and
Bowman, 2016; Berliner, 2017) and pressures and demands from various external stake-
holders, such as the general public, interest groups, and the civil society (Anderson et al.,
2019; Bearfield and Bowman, 2016) in making local governments more (or less)
transparent.
However, a notable gap in the extant literature is that hardly any research has inves-
tigated the influences of the complex vertical bureaucratic dynamics in a multilevel power
structure on local governments’compliance with transparency mandates. This scholarly
omission is puzzling given that most countries in the world have a vertical power struc-
ture with multiple levels of authority, and the significant impacts of higher-level author-
ities on local policy behaviors have been broadly recognized in the public administration
and political science literature. While recent studies have appealed for more attention to
Li and Chen83
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