Contacting, Petitioning, and Satisfaction with Government Responsiveness: Nationwide Survey Evidence from China

Chinese citizens have access to a wide range of institutional channels through which they can give political input, including contacting elected officials, contacting civil servants, and petitioning. For each of these modalities, Wave 5 of the Asian Barometer Survey allows me to distinguish between recent participants (those who did this in the last three years), potential participants (those who have not recently done this, but would), and non-participants (those who have not and would not do this). I find that across all three modalities, potential participants are more optimistic about government responsiveness than non-participants. But recent petitioners are significantly less optimistic than potential petitioners, and recent contactors are not significantly different from potential contactors in their impressions of government responsiveness. This indicates that petitioners come away disillusioned about responsiveness, while contacting officials has either no net effect or a slight negative effect, but no persistent positive effect.