Pollution Lowers Support for China’s Regime Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Beijing

Using an eight-week-long original survey conducted day by day in Beijing in 2015, we leverage daily variation in air quality to estimate the causal effects of pollution on support for the Chinese regime. Our results show that pollution decreases satisfaction with both central and local governments a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 80; no. 1; pp. 327 - 331
Main Authors Alkon, Meir, Wang, Erik H.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago Press 01.01.2018
Subjects
Air pollution
Air quality
Authoritarianism
Causality
Citizens
Environmental engineering
Environmentalism
Experiments
Governance
Government
Leverage
Local government
Outdoor air quality
Oversight
Polls & surveys
Pollution
Public opinion
Quasi-experimental methods
Satisfaction
SHORT ARTICLE
Statistical inference
Beijing China
China
public opinion
causal inference
China
authoritarian regimes
environmental politics
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Summary:Using an eight-week-long original survey conducted day by day in Beijing in 2015, we leverage daily variation in air quality to estimate the causal effects of pollution on support for the Chinese regime. Our results show that pollution decreases satisfaction with both central and local governments and increases demand for oversight of government. Additionally, we time our survey to partially coincide with a period during which the government intentionally reduced air pollution, allowing us to exploit a unique instance of authoritarian environmental engineering. We show that government efforts to reduce pollution do successfully improve citizens’ evaluations of the regime. To our knowledge, this article provides the first causal estimates of the challenges to popular support posed by environmental issues in a developing country and also illustrates the specific ways in which public opinion under authoritarian governance is affected by pollution.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/694577