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A large-scale field experiment on participatory decision-making in China

Nature Human Behaviour (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Can local democratic decision-making in authoritarian environments increase or pacify civic engagement and government accountability? Here we conducted an intervention reaching over 20 million people in China. Communities were randomly assigned such that citizens in treatment communities were invited to deliberate and make collective decisions on how local community budgets were allocated through both in-person and online communication channels (participatory budgeting). We find that participatory decision-making in community budgeting increased a wide range of civic-engagement behaviours outside of the budgeting domain 6 months after the start of the intervention. Residents in treatment communities reported more need for improvement from the central government, providing a potential foundation for seeking accountability from the authoritarian regime. These changes were accompanied by a more positive societal outlook and increased satisfaction in the country’s policies.

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Fig. 1: The intervention consistently improved civic-engagement behaviours.
Fig. 2: Citizens’ need for improvement from central versus local government.
Fig. 3: General satisfaction.

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Data availability

Data collection was approved by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Institutional Review Board (number 21-000085). The study was pre-registered on Open-Science Framework (https://osf.io/ypge7/). Data will be available under restrictions. As the data contain individual and district information from Mainland China, data availability will be subject to restrictions under China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), which came into effect in November 2021. The field experimental dataset is proprietary to our field partner Social Equity and Participation Center, and the dataset is subject to strict privacy regulations. The corresponding authors can facilitate the connection between data requesters and the field partner, ensuring that proper approval is obtained for accessing the data.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the local survey enumerators, research assistants and staff at the Social Equity and Participation Center for research support. This work is supported by the UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows (awarded to S.J.W.) and the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (A-0003186-00-00 awarded to K.M.M.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank R. Truex, D. Tian, X. Xu, X. Hu and N. Goldstein for their feedback and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sherry Jueyu Wu

  2. China Europe International Business School, Shanghai, China

    Ke Michael Mai

  3. Chengdu Academy of Social Sciences, Chengdu, China

    Ming Zhuang

  4. Division of Public Policy, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Fangxin Yi

Authors
  1. Sherry Jueyu Wu
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  4. Fangxin Yi
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study design and jointly supervised the work. M.Z. led the study implementation and data collection. S.J.W. led the data analysis, conceptualized the study and drafted the article. K.M.M., M.Z. and F.Y. revised the article.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sherry Jueyu Wu or Fangxin Yi.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Diether W. Beuermann, Jessica Teets and the other, anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary experimental design, randomization strategy, robustness checks with randomization inference, robustness checks with bootstrapping, robustness checks with approximate maximum influence perturbation analysis, Fig. 1 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Wu, S.J., Mai, K.M., Zhuang, M. et al. A large-scale field experiment on participatory decision-making in China. Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01964-y

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