Whose Voices Are Being Heard? The Impacts of Public Participation on Policy Attention in China

Abstract

The growing prominence of environmental research in public administration underscores the need to examine how public participation shapes environmental regulations. Yet, the impact of public participation on government policy attention remains underexplored. This article explores whether public participation has practical implications for policymaking or merely serves a normative role within authoritarian environmentalism. According to the visibility theory, participation by actors with high political visibility can significantly influence public perception and policymaking. Using data from prefecture-level cities in China, we find that while participation from ordinary citizens enhances local public environmental awareness, these effects are not statistically significant. In contrast, participation from politically visible actors significantly increases environmental awareness among local citizens, leading to greater policy attention and positive short-term improvements in environmental outcomes. Moreover, public environmental awareness primarily affects absolute policy attention rather than relative policy attention. Consistent with punctuated equilibrium theory, significant shifts in relative policy attention are less likely without major disruptions or heightened visibility of environmental issues. This is because local governments in developing countries must balance multiple competing priorities, making it challenging to reallocate attention and resources away from other critical issues. Our findings point to the differential impact of public participation with varying degrees of political visibility on environmental awareness and demonstrate how such awareness influences absolute but not relative policy attention in local policymaking.