Social accountability as social movement outcome: Protests in a Chinese city

Abstract

Social accountability is a concept that has been used much in development studies and democratic theory to study informal ways for civil society to achieve social change and hold governments accountable. Surprisingly, it has been far less used in social movement scholarship and we argue that social accountability, understood as a combination of answerability, legal claim attainment, and sanction, is a useful way to examine social movement outcomes in China. Social accountability directs the focus of research towards the target of protest and not only whether the protest resulted in policy changes or not. Based on field work in 2013–2015, this article examines four cases of social protests in the Chinese city of Hangzhou. In line with previous research we find that when citizen claims accord with government policies and protesters are well-organized, local authorities tend to accommodate the protesters’ claims. However, answerability and sanction do not always follow the same pattern. Answerability can be relatively high also when legal claims are unsuccessful. This means that cases that are commonly seen as unsuccessful protests because the legal demands were not accommodated may still result in partial social accountability. In addition to the presentation of original empirical findings, the study makes a theoretical contribution by linking the two research fields of social movement and social accountability, which will be of interest to a wider scholarly audience.