When top-down meets bottom-up: Local officials and selective responsiveness within fiscal policymaking in China

Abstract Responding to public opinion is a fundamental function of the modern state. While numerous empirical studies have examined the opinion-policy link in the context of democracies, few have explored policy responsiveness in authoritarian countries and we know little about how local governments make policy decisions when the citizens’ preferences conflict with the directives of the superiors. Drawing on a survey experiment involving 3059 local officials in China, this study examines whether superiors’ priorities and citizens’ opinions have an impact on fiscal decision-making and how officials react to contradictory preferences between their superiors and the local public. Using randomized treatments that provide different scenarios across the samples, we find that local officials selectively comply with superiors’ directives and local citizens’ opinions. On the one hand, local officials would follow superiors’ directive for economic investment but might ignore those for welfare provision; on the other hand, they tend to respond to public opinion in a limited but significant fashion when the citizens’ preferences conflict with the superiors’ priorities. Moreover, the statistical results suggest that local officials’ policy preferences have a strong impact on their policy decisions. These findings help us to understand the behavior of local officials and highlight their roles in devising fiscal policies that foster local development.