Transparency for Authoritarian Stability: Open Government Information and Contention with Institutions in China

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that authoritarian states bear the cost to social stability for information disclosure. This study investigates the effect of an increasingly common transparency initiative in authoritarian countries—open government information (OGI). Through publishing policy information, OGI allows citizens to identify illegal government behavior. Drawing from the Chinese case, I theorize that while such policy transparency reveals whether governments violate laws, it encourages the use of institutional dispute resolution channels. It redirects popular discontent from the streets to institutions, fostering rather than threatening social stability in autocracies. Using online and in-the-field survey experiments about OGI on land-taking compensation, I show that policy transparency improves citizens' preference for legal and political institutions and causes them to prioritize institutions over protest when they have grievances against the government. Multiple findings about the mechanisms suggest that policy information provides evidence, which increases citizens' perceived fairness of institutions in resolving their specific cases.

Keywords: transparency, protest, dispute resolution, authoritarian politics, China

JEL Classification: H1