Internet Environmental Appeals,Promotion Incentives And Local Environmental Governance

The social amplification effect of Internet environmental appeals allow regional social issues evolve into hot national concerning issues rapidly,which can create tremendous pressure on the central and local governments.The focus of our article is that,in the Internet era of explosive information dissemination,whether there is internal connections between the public,the central and local governments in local environmental governance.This paper uses 2010-2017 panel data from 31 provinces in China,from the perspective of promotion incentives of local officials,we constructs an intermediary effect model to analyze the intermediary mechanism of Internet environmental appeals and local environmental governance,and further analyzes the environmental governance effect and its impact on the regional economy.The result is as follows:（1）As a new form of public participation,online environmental appeals can both strengthen local environmental governance directly and through promotion incentives of local officials by higher authorities.From the perspective of regional heterogeneity,it is only in the developed eastern regions that online environmental appeals will significantly affect environmental governance.In the central and western regions,it is still only the traditional public participation that works.From the perspective of the age heterogeneity of officials,the slack effect of the long tenures experienced by young officials on environmental governance will be weakened.（2）The strengthened environmental governance have significant effects,especially on air pollutions.（3）Local environmental governance does have a negative impact on the regional economy,but the extent of the impact is relatively small.Our research is of great significance to provide policy enlightenment for the utilize of informatization to solve the problem of incomplete implementation of environmental policies.