When blame avoidance meets transparency: local governments’ bandwagon strategy in environmental information disclosure in China

Abstract

Despite the ample literature on government transparency, our knowledge about local governments’ strategic responses to transparency mandates, especially those in non-democratic regimes, is limited. This study sets out to fill this gap by investigating local governments’ strategic behaviours in implementing environmental information disclosure (EID), a specific form of government transparency, in the context of China. We assert that local governments in China are largely steered by the motivation of blame avoidance (BA) in EID and tend to adopt the bandwagon strategy, a specific form of anticipatory BA strategy. Moreover, having patronage ties with political superiors weakens local governments’ tendency to engage in the bandwagon strategy. Using city-level governments as the unit of analysis, we apply spatial econometric models in various specifications and find strong evidence that substantiates our arguments.