Discussion paper
DP18588 Social Media and Government Responsiveness: Evidence from Vaccine Procurement in China
This paper studies how public opinion on social media affects local governments' procurement of vaccines in China during 2014-2019. To establish causality, we exploit city-level variation in the eruption of online opinion on vaccine safety, instrumented by quasi-random early penetration of social media. We find that governments in cities exposed to stronger social media shocks increased the share of more-transparent procurement and shifted procurement from small local suppliers to reputable nonlocal suppliers. The effect is driven by posts expressing anti-government sentiment instead of posts containing investigative information and is larger in cities where local officials face higher top-down political pressure.
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