Exploring Citizens’ Hierarchical Government Satisfaction: Evidence from China and Taiwan

Abstract

Although the importance of public satisfaction is well documented, few studies have been conducted on the diversity of citizens’ evaluations of the various levels of government. This study explored hierarchical government satisfaction among the public in two culturally Chinese societies, namely China and Taiwan. Basing the analysis on the perspective of responsibility attribution, this paper proposes that the two publics’ distinctive perceptions, which are shaped by different information flows, lead hierarchical government satisfaction in the two societies in separate directions. This argument is supported by the empirical findings from the sixth wave of the World Values Survey. The findings confirm that personal evaluations, including household economic satisfaction, democratic evaluation, and public service confidence, exert more influence over local government satisfaction in China, but conversely have a greater impact on central government satisfaction in Taiwan. Moreover, these evaluations are shown to affect hierarchical government satisfaction differently in the two societies. The evidence reveals that the two publics attribute blame for problems to different administrative objects: Chinese citizens tend to blame local governments, whereas Taiwanese citizens are inclined to criticize the central government.

Who Protests and Why: Hierarchical Government Trust and Protest Participation in China

“…Consistent with other research concerning China (e.g. Su et al 2016;Huang 2018), the mean for trust in the central government is higher than the mean for trust in local government, 3.34 compared with 2.74. The differential trust measure also shows that individuals generally trust the central government at least as much as local governments.…”

“…We believe part of the answer to this question lies with individuals' hierarchical political trust. Scholars have pointed out that in China people have more trust in the central government than in their local governments (Li 2016;Wu and Wilkes 2018;Chen 2017;Huang 2018), but the broader effect of this hierarchical pattern of political trust on protest participation has not been tested empirically. In the following section we explain how variations in political trust across different levels of China's power structure affect protest participation.…”

“…Some scholars argue that China's power structure also generates different sets of expectations on the part of citizens, and corresponding differences in the sense of satisfaction, regarding the central government versus the local governments (Bernstein and Lü 2000;Li 2004;2008;Su et al 2016;Huang 2018;Chen 2017). They find that central government authorities generally enjoy greater political trust than lower level authorities: people tend to blame local authorities for unfavorable situations, while having greater respect for the central authorities.…”

“…Given that the motivation of these protests is not national political reform, some have proposed that they instead reflect dissatisfaction with local government officials and firms over specific local grievances; their dissatisfaction is not with the central authorities. Local protests, then, represent an appeal by locals to the central authorities to remedy local grievances (Li 2016;Chen 2017;Huang 2018). This expectation, for example, has been reinforced by the central authorities' use of the institutionalized inspection system as a mechanism to expose publicly and hold accountable local government officials who have come to the attention of central authorities for corruption or abuse of their authority and of citizens (Xi 2017, 460).…”

Perception of Official Corruption, Satisfaction With Government Performance, and Subjective Wellbeing—An Empirical Study From China

“…Citizens’ satisfaction with the government may exhibit specific patterns in accordance with country’s administrative frameworks ( Huang, 2018 ). China has experienced eight waves of administrative reforms from 1982 to 2018 to improve government performance, and previous studies believe that those reforms are mostly domestically based and have “Chinese characteristics” ( Gao, 2010 ; Zang and Wang, 2018 ).…”