Do Local Government Officials Discriminate Against Migrant Workers? a Field Experiment on Mayors’ Mailboxes in China

Discrimination against certain social groups over long time periods has been a historical and persistent feature of many societies. In China, in particular rural-to-urban migrant workers are affected by social discrimination. Studies in countries that had legacies of institutionalized racism find ethnic bias among judges and politicians (Abrams et al, 2012; Broockman, 2011). In this paper, I study whether there is social discrimination on the part of government officials in contemporary China. I conducted a field experiment in 2015 to investigate how responsive local government officials are to requests for help with medical health insurance enrollment towards migrants on one side, and the urban citizens on the other side. In two emails sent to each prefecture mayor’s mailbox, I deliberately differentiated two emails by using different language styles: either as a migrant worker with a rural family background or a local citizen with an urban family background. Overall, 151 prefectures from 19 provinces were included in the experiment. I do not find evidence of unequal responsiveness between migrant workers and local citizens in terms of response rate, time needed to receive a reply and number of words in the reply. However, further analysis on the content of each response shows that the quality of responses to migrant workers is lower than that to local citizens. There is also a geographical pattern such that officials in provinces with more outmigration responded in a better and more equal manner towards both migrant workers and local citizens than officials from other provinces. I argue that the observable geographical pattern of treatment between migrants and locals are mainly explained by the closer social proximity between migrant workers and members of the administrative staff in these prefectures.