Does Fiscal Transparency Increase Citizen Participation In The Budget?

Increasing citizens’ participation in the budget is the core of modern democratic politics and an important link to realize the whole process of people’s democracy.High citizen participation in the budget means that citizens have strong enthusiasm for participation,and a wide range of channels for citizen participation,which is more conducive to reducing government corruption and improving the financial management mechanism.Regrettably,at the practical level,our citizens’ political participation is mainly manifested in their concern for issues and interests closely related to daily life,while their participation in the budget is still very limited.So how to increase the participation of citizens in the budget is a problem worth thinking about.The relationship between transparency and engagement is often assumed to be obvious,but there is little literature on it,let alone the relationship between the two.This paper tries to clarify the relationship between financial transparency and citizen’s budget participation,and uses the method of empirical test to try to answer the question of the degree of influence of financial transparency on citizen’s budget participation.What is the influence path between the two? In our current situation,how to increase the participation of citizens in the budget? And how to improve the transparency of the budget on the basis of increasing the degree of participation in the budget?Based on the existing literature,this paper focuses on the relationship between financial transparency and citizens’ participation in budget,aiming at improving citizens’ participation in budget.Firstly,this paper introduces the concepts of citizen’s budget participation and financial transparency,including the types and characteristics of citizen’s budget participation,and the significance of improving citizen’s budget participation,and reviews the relevant literature of influencing factors such as technology empowerment and local economy.Secondly,combining the whole-process people’s democracy theory and principal-agent theory,this paper discusses the influence mechanism of improving financial transparency on improving citizens’ budget participation,and puts forward the hypothesis that high financial transparency can improve citizens’ budget participation.The empirical part takes the page views or clicks of the budget disclosure websites of 95 prefecture-level city people’s governments in China from 2013 to 2020 as the dependent variable,and the scores in the Research Report on Financial Transparency of Chinese Municipal Governments(2013-2020)released by Tsinghua University as the independent variable for regression analysis,and empirically analyzes the influence of financial transparency on citizens’ budget participation.The empirical results show that the improvement of fiscal transparency will significantly improve the participation of citizens in the budget,and further explore its influence mechanism,and then carry out a robustness test,indicating that the empirical results are robust.Finally,combined with the policy development and current situation of improving citizens’ participation in budget,this paper puts forward some specific suggestions for further improvement,such as further perfecting the relevant legal system,further refining the content of government website budget disclosure in combination with digital finance,and further transforming the concept of government budget disclosure.