Transparency for Authoritarian Stability: Open Government Information and Contention with Institutions in China
2026-01-24
abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that authoritarian states bear a cost to social stability for disclosing information. This study investigates the effect of an increasingly common transparency initiative in authoritarian countries: open government information (ogi). By publishing policy information, ogi allows citizens to identify illegal government behavior. Drawing from the Chinese case, the author theorizes that although such policy transparency reveals whether governments violate laws, it encourages the use of institutional channels for resolving disputes. By redirecting popular discontent from the streets to institutions, such transparency initiatives foster social stability in autocracies rather than threatening it. Using online and in-the-field survey experiments about ogi on land-taking compensation, the author shows that policy transparency improves citizens’ preference for legal and political institutions and causes them to prioritize institutions over protest when they have grievances against the government. Multiple findings about the mechanisms suggest that policy information increases citizens’ perceived fairness of institutions in resolving their specific cases.