The Paradox of Responsive Authoritarianism: How Civic Activism Spurs Environmental Penalties in China

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Marquis, Christopher; Bird, Yanhua
• 署名单位: Cornell University; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2018.1212
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 948-968
• 关键词: civic activism; authoritarianism; CHINA; regulation; Corporate sustainability

摘要

Recognizing the need to better understand institutional change processes in authoritarian states, which play an increasingly prominent role in the world economy, we examine the efficacy of civic activism aimed at spurring governmental action concerning the environmental performance of firms in China. We highlight the paradox of responsive authoritarianism on display in China: to avoid needing to rule by coercion alone, the government seeks citizens' feedback and tolerates pressures for change, but at the same time it resists the associated legitimacy threats regarding its capacity to rule. Local governments and the media play crucial and dual roles in this system: they mitigate change pressures from civic activism that takes place within the state's systems, but they magnify change pressures from publicly visible civic activism occurring outside those systems. We test our conceptual model using a unique data set of environmental penalties imposed on Chinese publicly listed firms from 2007 to 2011. Our findings contribute to understanding processes of institutional change and outcomes of social movements.