Revisiting the nexus of Internet and political participation: a longitudinal study of environmental petition in China

ABSTRACT

The political implications of the Internet remain as a long-debated question. To clarify this puzzle, this study draws on insights from political opportunity structure theory and three prompts for political action in the digital media environment to examine how the development of the Internet is related to environmental petition, a type of citizen-initiated political activity in the state realm in China. Using government statistics from multiple sources, we conducted time-series cross-sectional analyses to estimate the impacts of Internet penetration on environmental petition in China’s 31 provinces over a 13-year period (2003–2015). The findings show that Internet penetration had a long-term negative effect on visit petition but a positive one on letter petition. Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet
• China
• political opportunity structure
• political participation
• environmental petition

Acknowledgments

The research was supported by a grant from the Center for East Asian Studies of the University of Texas at Austin. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented by the first author at the Graduate Seminar on China Conference held by Universities Service Centre for China Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019. The authors thank seminar participants, annonymous reviewers, Wenhong Chen, Thomas Johnson, Gina Masullo, and Iris Chyi for their feedback and Ming Curran for proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

1. Given the data of the study spans from 2002 to 2015, the description of Internet penetration here focuses on the status as of 2015.

2. The 31 provincial-level administrative units are Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian, Jiangxi, Shandong, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang.

3. It should be noted that the provincial GDP is highly correlated with Internet penetration rates cross-sectionally, with the coefficients ranging from 0.81 in 2015 to 0.96 in 2003 and 0.89 for the pooled sample. Since GDP is a theoretically relevant variable, we must include it in our models to see whether the effects of Internet penetration still exist after controlling for it. While multicollinearity could have diminished the statistical significance of the covariates involved, it does not make insignificant effects significant. Our results show that, despite the collinearity, Internet penetration has a unique effect on both types of petitions independent of its covariation with provincial GDP. In other words, the results are not affected by the collinearity because the effects of Internet penetration are still evident even after controlling for provincial GDP.

4. We thank an anonymous reviewer who suggest the two possibilities to check the robustness of the findings. All results of the robustness tests are available in the supplementary material.

5. The study uses 2010 as the demarcation, because this year is marked as the first year of the development of Chinese microblogs (People’s Daily, 2010).

6. Most developed regions refer to those provinces with GDP over 70 million yuan per thousand persons in a given year. The regions include Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia, and Zhejiang. More details are available in the supplementary material.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin .

Notes on contributors

Shuning Lu

Shuning Lu, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. Her research focuses on media uses and effects, civic and political participation, and social and political implications of digital media. Her research has been published in the New Media & Society, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Policy & Internet, among other journals.

Tse-min Lin

Tse-min Lin, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on American politics, methodology, and game theory. His works have been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, among other journals.