The relationship between public participation in environmental governance and corporations? environmental violations

We explore the relationship in China between public participation in environmental governance and corporations' environmental violations. We do so by collecting data on unlisted corporations' environmental violations from 2012 to 2015 and manually matching these data with the number of environment-related proposals made by People's Congress deputies of different provinces. We find that public participation in environmental governance significantly decreases the number of environmental violations by corporations. We use the Eco-environmental Credit Policy as a policy shock in a difference-in-differences regression to confirm our finding. We conclude that public participation in environmental governance increases the number of local environmental regula-tions and thus restrains environmental violations by corporations.