Chinese Citizens, Given Voice in Local Budgeting, Are More Satisfied With Country’s Regime — and Want More From It

Taste of democracy engenders the opposite of cynicism

Centralized regimes and countries looking to transition away from authoritarianism would seem to have diametrically different governing approaches, but they share a desire, or need, to get buy-in from their citizenry.

Over the past four decades, a common strategy deployed globally has been to empower citizens, unschooled in the ways of civic engagement, with a say in local government spending. If you’re trying to move to a more democratic form of government, “participatory budgeting” introduces the role of civic engagement in framing public policy. For entrenched regimes, offering citizens a voice in local government — with the explicit goal of improving day-to-day life through more and better needed services — can increase satisfaction with the central regime. A modicum of democracy may work as pacifier.

Past research has focused on how these programs funnel more government spending to projects most valued by local residents, which increases general satisfaction with public service and in turn strengthens the institutional resilience of the centralized regime. 

UCLA Anderson’s Sherry Jueyu Wu, China Europe International Business School-Shanghai’s Ke Michael Mai, Chengdu Academy of Social Sciences’ Ming Zhuang and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Fangxin Yi extend the understanding of downstream impacts of participatory budgeting by studying whether such programs shift citizens’ embrace of civic engagement beyond the budgeting process, and whether more engagement locally impacts how participants view the central government. 

The research team led a large field study on participatory budgeting, which targeted over 21 million residents across hundreds of communities in Chengdu, the fourth-largest city in China. A representative sample of nearly 8,000 residents was surveyed for the study. Residents in communities that were given an active role in framing local budget priorities indeed signaled more interest in civic engagement six months after that process was complete, compared with residents in control communities that were not recruited to work on municipal budget priorities.  

The authors’ paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, also found that people in communities involved in the local budgeting process expressed a greater need for the central government to step up its game, compared with the control group. But that heightened desire for their government to be more responsive is not some negative outcome where a whiff of democracy in action sours participants on their totalitarian system. The study participants who were exposed to the democratic process of engagement in the local budgeting process were, at the same time, more satisfied with the central government than the control group.

“Rather than inducing dissatisfaction or backlash, local participatory decision-making seems to increase citizens’ responsive citizenship and their general evaluation of public policy,” the researchers write.

This positive, yet not destabilizing, impact of introducing a bit of democracy in an otherwise undemocratic system complements other research Wu has co-authored that found Chinese factory workers encouraged to be more involved in their work system reported higher satisfaction, and overall productivity rose as well. 

Having a Say

Using China to study the impact of introducing democratic processes may seem a bit odd, given the country’s resolute commitment to centralized regime governance. The researchers assert that’s a feature, not a bug. The fact that Chinese residents on the whole tend to be more satisfied with the central government compared with their local government makes for a compelling starting point for their research. And Chengdu has been deploying “participatory budgeting” programs since 2008, giving the researchers an infrastructure into which they can insert their field experiment. 

The more than 7,800 residents in the 2021 study — a representative sample of Chengdu’s over 20 million population — were members of 39 community-level groups spanning rural and urban regions in the randomized control trial. Nineteen of these groups engaged in a participatory budgeting process for their municipality and 20 control groups did not at the time of the data collection. 

Participants answered a series of questions six months after the participatory budgeting exercise designed to get a sense of what they felt about nine other examples of civic engagement. 

As shown below, participating in the budget process triggered significantly more interest in the majority of the civic behaviors tested.

Participants were also asked their opinion of the central government, on a scale of 1 to 4  (the higher the number, the more subjects wanted the government to act). The average 1.75 score across all participants connotes a desire for a moderate level of improvement in the central government. But here too, those who engaged in the budgeting process were more demanding, with an average score of 1.8 versus 1.61 for the control group. There was no meaningful divergence in opinions when the same question was posed in regard to the local government.

Do Even Better

Interestingly, the heightened expectations of participants who got a taste of civic engagement through the local budgeting process weren’t an expression of frustration with the totalitarian regime or the local government. This group reported higher satisfaction levels with the central government than the control group when queried about their general opinion of the country’s policies, as well as being significantly more satisfied with their city’s economy. The participants in the budgeting process also expressed more pride in their city, which seems to be related to the fact they also reported a stronger sense of voice.