Public participation and policy evaluation in China's smog governance

This paper explicitly addresses the key works of public participation in subjective policy evaluation from the perspective of smog governance. Based on the unique data from a large survey distributed to more than 3500 respondents in 37 key cities of China, we adopt the ordered probit model to identify the factors affecting public evaluation towards the smog-governing policy. To solve the endogeneity problem, we construct an effective instrumental variable - the policy strength of government in eliminating smog to analyze empirically. The results suggest that public participation are significant and important predictors of the public evaluation, higher degree of participation is associated with more positive subjective evaluation. Further, this paper explores the role of effective public perception and concern as well as the expected subsidy. The results show that the public who actively participate into the co-governance of smog are more concern about the air quality and also have lower expected subsidy.