Tongtong Zhang - Authoritarian Responsiveness As Exemplifying

Despite lacking electoral incentives, officials in non-democracies provide numerous deliberation channels that respond to citizen requests. What motivate government responsiveness under dictatorship? Previous studies on authoritarian responsiveness generally claim that autocrats prioritize the request of potential dissidents, yet scholars of distributive politics largely argue that autocrats prioritize distributing to their core supporters. I propose to reconcile these two competing theories by contending that autocrats strategically maneuver responses of different qualities to different segments of population for social control. Using original data of over 156,000 online citizen appeals and government responses in China, I show that local officials selectively provide substantive responses—responses that resolve the appealed problems—to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime's surveillance and censorship policies on the Internet. In contrast, officials selectively provide symbolic responses—responses that are soothing without solving the problems—to citizen appeals that are more likely to elicit collective action. Using interviews with local officials in East, Central, and West China, I find that officials perform this selective responsiveness primarily to exemplify the message to petitioners and potential petitioners that compliance, not organized opposition, will open doors for satisfying their demands. These findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize accountability under autocracy not only as a reactive approach to appease opposition, but also as a proactive strategy to cultivate conformity.