China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 108

Subjective and Objective Air Quality in Urban China
the former as a proxy of the latter. In
the survey, we asked the respondents
about their access to government information,
but it is not specifically
about environmental information. We
encourage future studies to collect
more fine-tuned data to measure environmental
transparency.
Second, our data are cross-sectional
and we cannot infer causal
mechanisms through which objective
air quality measures affect subjective
perceptions. It would be promising to
use experimental design (e.g., natural
and quasi-experiments) to examine the
interaction effects of air pollution and
transparency on citizens’ perceptions.
Third, we only surveyed residents in
large cities in China, and our findings
reported here should not be overgeneralized
to small and medium-sized
cities. Given China’s large geographical
disparity in economic development,
energy structure, and environmental
pollution, we call for future research to
replicate and extend our investigation
in other contexts (e.g., small and medium-size
cities) and employ more solid
measures and data analysis technique
to answer the research questions.
Acknowledgement
An earlier version of this manuscript
entitled “Government
Accountability and Citizens’
Satisfaction with Air Quality in Chinese
Cities” was presented at the Annual
Conference of The Hong Kong Educational
Research Association 2012-13,
February 22, 2013, Hong Kong Institute
of Education, Hong Kong, China.
We want to thank Hua Wang,
Xu Wu, and Yuan Xu for organizing
this workshop. We also thank workshop
participants and two anonymous
reviewers for helpful comments on
an earlier version of this paper. We
are grateful to financial support from
the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC) (No.: 71774164;
1633004) and the Key Project of Ministry
of Education (18JZD048).
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