The impact of public appeals on the performance of environmental governance in China: A perspective of provincial panel data

Members of the public may express their desire for environmental improvements and achieve results through varying methods. To achieve change, such things as Google Index, the number of incoming letters, the number of visitors, the proposals of the National People's Congress and the motions of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference all play a role. However, studies which theoretically analyze the relationship between public appeals and environmental improvement are relatively scarce. For this reason, this paper uses provincial panel data from 2004 to 2014 to analyze the impact of public appeals on the performance of environmental governance. The results show that, the stronger the public appeals for environmental issues, the greater the government's control over the handling of environmental pollution. In areas with serious environmental pollution problems, including Shanxi and Hebei, the public voice is relatively strong. The impact of the Google index on environmental improvement in central China is stronger than in eastern and western China. By re-measuring the explanatory variables with the number of incoming letters, the number of visitors, the proposals of the National People's Congress and the motions of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, we have discovered that the appeals of ordinary people can have the same impact on environmental improvement as those of social elites. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.