Appease or aggravate? The transparency-public complaints link and NGOs’ buffering effect

This study investigates the effect of transparency on citizen political engagement in an authoritarian context, focusing on how this effect is shaped by the types of disclosed information and the involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Using China’s environmental protection as an empirical setting, we introduced a novel index—incorporating both the quantity and quality of disclosed information—to evaluate local governments’ transparency and examined its impacts on public complaints, a prevalent form of citizen political engagement in the country. Statistical analysis shows: 1) The disclosure of policy content and outcome information tends to aggravate citizen complaints, whereas the disclosure of decision-making information and regulatee information does not. 2) Environmental NGOs (eNGOs) play a buffering role, mitigating the increase in citizen complaints associated with regulatee transparency. To further support these findings, we conducted in-depth interviews with four representative eNGOs, uncovering three mechanisms through which eNGOs help alleviate citizens’ grievances and complaints.