Authoritarian responsiveness: Online consultation with “issue publics” in China
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, public consultation has become a standard feature of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies found evidence of government responsiveness to citizens' demands, they did not measure responsiveness in terms of real policy change. This article presents the first systematic analysis of Chinese central government policy responsiveness to consultative input. In 2008, the Chinese government unveiled a blueprint for health‐care reform, inviting the public to post their opinions online. Having collected 27,899 online comments, the government subsequently published a revised draft. This article analyzes a random sample of 2% of this corpus of comments, assessing the effect of comments on revisions while controlling for both media content and bureaucratic preferences. The findings demonstrate that public comments have an impact upon policy revisions and suggest that the Chinese government is more responsive to street‐level implementers than to other social groups.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it