Environmental Complaints And Local Government Responses

Online complaints have gradually become a form of social supervision and are the most commonly used method for the public to reflect environmental issues with the government.Based on the dual nature of Weibo-based online complaints that have both communication and interaction,"microblogging and political inquiry" plays an increasingly important role in public participation in environmental governance.Therefore,this study focuses on Weibo’s environmental complaints and local government response,analyzes the current status and laws of Weibo’s complaints,and uses an econometric model to explore the influencing factors of local governments responding to online complaints in order to make public participation in government environmental governance more effective.Clear and complete understanding,so as to better promote the government’s management of the Weibo platform and the guidance of the Internet public opinion.In order to explore the influence factors of local governments responding to online complaints,this article first reviews and summarizes relevant literature on public participation,network supervision,government affairs microblog,and environmental governance.Then we construct the corresponding theoretical framework,and analyzes the local government’s response to Weibo’s complaints from five aspects:"degree of concern","user type","government level","higher government attention" and "enterprise characteristics".In terms of data,this article selected 8618 complaints from the Sina Weibo platform in China from 2014 to 2016 as research samples,and the complaints were screened against the environmental issues of the national key monitored enterprises.At the same time,through the Python crawler and big data processing technology to obtain the mining data of the Sina Weibo platform in China,the empirical data of the Ministry of Environmental Protection data center,statistical accounts at all levels,environmental statistics database and the Wind,CCER financial database,as the data set of this study.In terms of econometric models,this paper constructs a logistic regression model,studies and analyzes the impact factors of local governments responding to network complaints,estimates the effect of each influencing factor on government microblog response behavior,and uses the probit model to test the robustness of the main findings of this paper.Based on the above research,this paper has done two expansions:further analyzed the influencing factors of local government complaint response time difference,and analyzed the heterogeneity of Weibo’s different characteristics.The empirical results of this paper verify the factors such as posting’s"forwarding volume",users’ "institutional certification","government level","higher government attention",enterprises’ "industrial output value" and "listing situation" to the impact of the governments’ response.The more the number of forwarding complaints for online complaints,the more likely it is for local governments to respond;complaints from institutionally authenticated users are more likely to be answered by local governments than complaints from uncertified users;the lower the administrative level of local governments,the more possibly they are to respond to complaints.The online complaints concerned by higher levels of government are more likely to be responded to by local governments;the higher the industrial output of national key monitored enterprises involved in online complaints,the lower the likelihood of local government responding.In response,if the national key monitored enterprises involved in network complaints are listed,the likelihood of local government responding is higher.From the Weibo response time point of view,the more the number of network complaints to be forwarded,the faster the local government responds;after the user account that issued the complaint has been personally or institutionally certified,the complaint is answered faster than the uncertified one.Institutional certification is faster than personal certification;the greater the industrial output value,the faster the government responds;the higher the value of forest coverage or industrial power generation,the faster the local government responds;In each year of 2014,2015,2016 and 2017,complaints are answered faster than the previous year.Finally,this paper proposes to standardize government microblog job management,strengthen the supervision of higher level government departments,increase the overall influence of government microblog,and establish a linkage mechanism between microblogs at all levels of government.