Vertical and horizontal accountability: determinants of government transparency in China

Influenced by a tradition of secretive public administration, China has not treated transparency as a prominent feature of its political culture. Since the adoption of Regulations on Open Government Information in 2007, the Chinese government has been moving towards the goal of transparent government. However, significant transparency gaps remain among subnational governments, and the mechanisms underlying these gaps are not yet well understood. Drawing on principal-agent theory, this study investigates the determinants of subnational government transparency in China using a panel dataset from 2017 to 2021. The findings reveal that transparency is predominantly shaped by political and fiscal factors, while economic factors do not reach statistical significance and social factors exert conditional influence. This evidence suggests that subnational transparency in China is primarily driven by a vertical political logic that conditions the influence of horizontal social pressures.