——来自S省环境信访的证据
郑思尧 孟天广
摘要：中央督察是中央政府向地方政府传达意志和贯彻政策的重要途径。那么，自上而下的督察是否有助于自下而上的民意吸纳？本文认为，中央政府在进行督察时，将地方政府对人民意见的回应能力作为重点考察对象，因此地方政府受到督查组所带来的政治激励影响，将更为积极地对公众意见进行回应；当公众意见更多地包含对地方政府的不满情绪并涉及地方官员的特定行为时，督察对回应性的提升作用将更为明显。为了证实理论假设，我们使用S省2018-2019年的10930条省级环保热线信访件数据，利用双重差分法考察2018年11月中央环境督察组“回头看”进驻对S省信访件回复情况的影响。文章发现，督查显著提升了地方政府对信访件反映情况进行核实、关停和问责的概率，而对限产和罚款没有显著影响。进一步的机制分析表明，包含不满情绪和官员特定行为的信息均部分放大了督察对议题回应性的提升作用。文章的发现不仅阐明了纵向权力关系对政府回应性的影响，更有助于理解信息在自上而下和自下而上两种治理机制中扮演的关键角色。
关键词：中央督查；环境信访；政府回应性
【作者】郑思尧（通讯作者），清华大学政治学系博士研究生；孟天广，清华大学社会科学学院副院长，政治学系长聘副教授。
【Title】How Does Central Inspection Improves Local Government Responsiveness?
Evidence From Environmental Petitions In S Province
Abstract: Central inspection is an important approach for the central government to convey its will and implement policies. However, does top-down inspection help to absorb bottom-up public opinion? This paper holds that the central government takes local governments’ capacity to respond to the public as the key component of inspection, so local governments will respond more actively to public participation under the influence of political incentives brought by the central inspection team; when public opinions contain dissatisfaction with local governments and certain behaviors of local officials, the effect of inspection on improving responsiveness increases. In order to confirm the theoretical hypothesis, we use a dataset of 10930 provincial environmental protection petitions in S province from 2018 to 2019, and leverage the difference-in-difference model to investigate the impact of the central environmental inspection team in "looking back" in November 2018 on the local responsiveness in S province. The article finds that central inspection significantly improves the probability of local governments verifying, shutting down factories and punishing involved officials in response to the petitions, but has no significant impact on implementing restriction and fines. Further mechanism analysis shows that the information including dissatisfaction and officials' specific behavior partially amplifies the effect of central inspection. The findings of this paper not only clarify the impact of vertical power relations on government responsiveness, but also help to understand the key role of information in top-down and bottom-up governance mechanisms.
Key words: Central supervision, Environmental petition, Government responsiveness