How can local governments be motivated to actively engage in social governance? The central government employs “ratings and recognition” to incentivize competition and comprehensive development among local governments. As a key non-economic initiative aimed at promoting efficient governance, can this approach enhance public perceptions of government performance? Taking environmental ratings and recognition as an example, we manually collected data on typical national-level environmental awards from 2011 to 2015 and merged them with the database of the 2015 Chinese Social Survey. To avoid any ecological fallacy, we adopted a multilevel model regression analysis. Additionally, we moved beyond a mere correlation in cross-sectional data to casual inferences, adding greater confidence in strengthening our study. First, lagging the independent variable by one period establishes the foundation for a causal relationship, ensuring that “cause precedes, effect follows”. Second, we examined the net effect of the ratings and recognition and perceived performance by matching the award (experimental group) and the non-award (control group) with the propensity score matching in a quasi-experimental approach. Again, we drew on the existing literature to select instrumental variables, including the frequency of environment-related terms in city government work reports, the growth rate of environmental staff, and the age of municipal secretaries(an interaction term between the age of municipal secretaries and the rate of economic growth). These variables help address potential endogeneity issues of a causal inversion between city awards and public perceptions of government performance. Finally, we included the Sanitary City and Civilized City ratings-two typical awards similar to, but distinct from, environmental ratings and recognition-as controls to account for alternative explanations and confounding factors. It is found that municipal winning of awards in environmental competitions, such as ratings and recognition, contributes to improve public perceptions of objective environmental quality and overall government performance. However, these awards are not significantly related to perceived government environmental performance. In addition, the relationship between the number of awards and public perceptions of performance follows an inverted U-shaped. As the number of awards increases, public perceptions of performance become more positive up to a certain threshold. Beyond this threshold, additional awards lead to more negative perceptions. Our findings confirm the positive but limited relationship between subjective and objective performance, filling the theoretical gap with evidence from Chinese cities. This research also contributes to answering the classic theoretical question of how to evaluate recognized service providers at the individual level. Moreover, our study suggests that evaluations and recognition should integrate more subjective performance and satisfaction. By prioritizing people's feelings and needs in environmental governance practices, these evaluations can complement objective performance. This approach enhances both the instrumental role of guiding and directing from the “top-down” and the value attribute of boosting public satisfaction from the “bottom-up”.
Yang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.