China Policy Journal Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2018 | Page 97

China Policy Journal
interventions, and local governments
who are willing to disclose and share
environmental information are favorably
supported by citizens. If local governments
can honestly disclose environmental
information and proactively
adopt policies to address environmental
pollution, then citizens are more
likely to support their policies. Despite
environmental pollution might not be
substantially reduced, citizens will tolerate
their sluggish improvement and
perceive environmental quality in a
more lenient way.
We argue that citizens’ perception
of air quality is positively related
to objective reading of air quality, and
environmental transparency moderates
this relationship. Specifically, we expect
that the objective–subjective air quality
relationship will be attenuated when the
level of environmental transparency is
higher. Recent studies have consistently
found that transparency moderates the
relationship between people’s perceptions
of government performance and
other social phenomena such as corruption
(Park and Blenkinsopp 2011) and
social equity (Wu, Ma, and Yu 2017).
Given these considerations, we develop
our second hypothesis as follows.
Hypothesis 2: Environment transparency
negatively moderates the relationship between
subjective and objective air quality,
and the relationship is weaker when
environmental transparency is higher.
Methods
Sample and Data
We use recent large-scale citizen
survey data and external
assessments in over 30 Chinese
largest cities to empirically examine
the interaction effects of objective
air quality and environmental transparency
on citizens’ subjective air quality.
We test the two hypotheses by using
multisource data from 32 largest cities
in China. The sample covers four municipalities
(Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai,
and Chongqing), 22 provincial capital
cities (e.g., Guangzhou and Hangzhou),
five subprovincial cities (Dalian, Qingdao,
Ningbo, Xiamen, and Shenzhen),
and one prefecture-level city (Suzhou).
The administrative structure in China
consists of five layers, and cities
are at the first three layers (provinces,
prefectures, and counties). There are
15 prefecture-level cities granted with
subprovincial authorities by the central
government, and 10 of them are
provincial capital cities (e.g., Harbin
and Xi’an). The sample of cities is comparable
in administrative ranks while
heterogeneous in geography and socioeconomic
development. The 32 largest
cities are frequent research subject for
urban management scholar in studying
China (Smyth, Mishra, and Qian 2008).
Data on citizens’ perceived air
quality are from the 2011 Lien Chinese
Cities Service-Oriented Government
Survey, which telephone interviewed
over 25,000 residents in 32 largest cities
by Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing
(CATI) method according to a
stratified sampling framework. In each
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