This article examines accountability after coal mine accidents in China using an original dataset of 968 accidents involving 3,503 government officials. It analyzes how accident severity, official rank, local economic dependence on coal, and the strengthening of coal mine safety supervision shape both the probability and the severity of accountability. The results show that more severe accidents are more likely to trigger sanction and result in harsher punishment. Higher-ranking officials are less likely to receive severe sanctions, and the effect of accident severity on their accountability probability is comparatively weaker. The findings also show that the impact of local coal dependence on accountability conditions on strengthening of coal mine safety supervision. Before 2003, greater local coal dependence weakened the responsiveness of accountability to accident severity and widened rank-based disparities in sanction severity, largely through harsher punishment of lower-ranking officials. After 2002, these coal-related hierarchical distortions were substantially reduced, although the general disparity sanction severity across administrative ranks persisted. These findings contribute to the study of official accountability in China by showing how bureaucratic rank, local economy, and regulatory environment jointly shape accountability outcomes.
This study examines how government capability and benevolence shape public trust and whether risk intensity changes the relative salience of these evaluations. A 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects survey experiment was conducted with 683 participants. Government capability and benevolence were manipulated as high or low, and the risk scenario was varied between low-risk and high-risk conditions. Government trust was measured as the change from pre-test to post-test. Results show that government capability had a stronger effect on trust than government benevolence. The two dimensions also worked in combination: the high-capability/high-benevolence condition showed the only positive mean change in trust, while weakness in either dimension reduced trust. High-risk scenarios attenuated the trust advantage of capability overall, but follow-up analyses showed that this attenuation was concentrated when government benevolence was low. The findings contribute to public administration research by showing how citizens evaluate government trustworthiness in cyber risk governance and by highlighting the importance of administrative capacity, the limits of benevolence without delivery capacity, and the need for expectation management in risk communication.
Crises can trigger multi-dimensional transformations in public administration systems. This study focuses on the integrated mechanism of learning during crisis to enhance our understanding of emergency management optimization in complex crisis environments. This study constructs an integrated analytical framework that integrates organizational adaptation and policy change to explain crisis learning in local governments and examines the sequential adaptive evolution of Xi’an City’s responses to the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants using network analysis and policy text analysis. The findings reveal that learning during crisis in Chinese local governments follows a practice emergence-policy institutionalization feedback loop: ad-hoc special work teams emerged to break rigid bureaucratic labor divisions, and their proven successful practices were institutionalized as permanent emergency working groups in revised emergency plans. This transition from a pure hierarchical structure to a function-led hybrid governance structure shifts local crisis governance from passive reactive response to proactive risk preparedness.
Does citizen coproduction of crisis response foster trust in local government? This study addresses this question by developing and testing a framework proposing that participation in community coproduction of crisis response (CCCR) enhances citizen trust through sense of control over daily life and perceived social capital generated during CCCR, and these processes are further conditioned by citizens’ pandemic risk perception. Using survey data collected from 1,106 urban residents during the 2022 COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai, China, we find that participation in CCCR generally strengthens trust in municipal government. The results show that this effect occurs primarily because participation in CCCR increases perceived social capital, whereas no evidence is found for the proposed role of sense of control. Moreover, the trust-enhancing effect disappears when risk perception is high, because elevated risk perception reduces the extent to which CCCR generates perceived social capital. These findings contribute evidence from a crisis context to the longstanding debate on whether coproduction enhances trust and provide explanations on how participatory arrangements can sustain governance legitimacy.
