Bringing Politics Back in Charitable Giving: Evidence From Donations After China’s Sichuan Earthquake

Abstract

Do non-Westerners donate differently? Drawing on a unique survey after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, this article reports some empirical findings about Chinese donation behavior. Our empirical analysis confirms the importance of various socioeconomic factors in charitable giving. What distinguishes the Chinese case from other societies is the role of politics. Political attitudes affect how people donate: Less trustful individuals and less dependent communities do not embrace state-centered charity enthusiastically. Our research expands the spatial coverage of the charity study that is dominated by experiences and practices from European and North American countries. To generate hypotheses about political attitudes, we develop a simple political model of charity. Placing politicians’ survival motivation at the center opens up new inquiries that are underexplored by current literature. It also inspires further research into comparative institutional designs of charity across national boundaries.

Examining Chinese Charitable Giving Under State Intervention: A Political Participation Perspective

“…This study enriches the scarce literature on the political dimension of charitable giving in Chinese citizens (e.g., Bi et al, 2010; Li et al, 2020). First, its examination of the gamut of political participation sheds light on revealing the state intervention mechanisms in charity, which was little researched in previous studies.…”

“…Although the state has stressed the principle of voluntary donation in legislations and government policies, its actual involvement in fundraising such as calling for donations and even personally soliciting donations imaginably affected people’s giving decisions, especially those who are working in state institutions (Bi et al, 2010). This partly resulted in the state agencies and their affiliated nonprofits having been the greatest receivers of charitable donations in the past years (Li et al, 2020). The written permission of state-conducted charitable fundraising persisted till the passage of the 2016 Charity Law.…”

“…Given the scarce literature about political participation and charitable giving (Li et al, 2020), we first develop some general propositions to guide empirical analysis in this exploratory study. We suppose that individuals’ political participation has different patterns of association with different state-intervened charitable donations, as presented in Table 1.…”

“…The reason is that people who are active in political action may perceive state intervention as politically significant and feel obligatory or even advantageous to participate. They will tend to make donations especially when they politically support the government (e.g., Li et al, 2020).…”

“…In addition, not rarely is giving used to directly pursue political goals by funding political organizations and political actions (Teorell et al, 2007). Given that political participation affects charitable giving in the presence of state power (Li et al, 2020), it is reasonable to assume that political participation respond to state intervention in charitable giving.…”