Research on public participation in environmental litigation: empirical evidence in China

In severe environmental situation, public participation in environmental litigation is an effective way to enhance environmental governance. To promote public participation in environmental litigation, this study uses the research data in China to analyze the influence of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation, and explores the path to improve the legalization level and public trust. The results show that illegal intervention, the difficulty in filing a case, the economic and time cost, the execution situation, and public trust significantly affect the enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation, and there is a positive interaction between the legalization level and public trust. In terms of the improvement path, the establishment of environmental courts and government accountability systems promote public participation in environmental litigation. The policy implications are that the public should be guided to actively participate in environmental litigation by promoting the legalization level, improving public trust in government environmental protection, and perfecting the environmental court system and environmental accountability mechanism, which could be helpful for environmental governance.


Introduction
With the rapid development of the global economy, environmental problems have become increasingly serious, and environmental pollution is a serious threat to human health (Tang et al 2021).According to Gottschalk (2017), the rise rate of global temperature during 2000-2016 was much faster than that during 1990-2000.Persistent organic pollutants affect water systems on a global scale (Schwarzenbach et al 2010).Air pollution, suspended particles of electronic waste, harmful pollutants from fossil fuels, and noise negatively affect people's physical and mental health (Kampa and Castanas 2008, Ebenstein et al 2013, Geravandi et al 2015, Wang et al 2019, José et al 2020).To control environmental pollution and provide a good natural environment for people's survival and development, it is necessary to take effective governance actions for bad environmental conditions.
According to the literature, public participation may be a such effective governance action.Mills (1959) and Scott (1981) emphasized the role of public participation, claiming that open to public opinions in the decisionmaking process can effectively avoid bureaucratic distortion of decision-making behavior.Lynd (1959) requires a larger scope of public participation in governmental decision-making process.As public participation is the process incorporating public concerns, needs and values into governmental decision-making (Creighton 2005), a better social condition can be brought by an effective and inclusive public participation (Lin 2011) .
The academic community generally maintains an optimistic attitude towards public participation in environmental governance.The public is a direct victim of environmental pollution and is strongly willing to participate in environmental governance (Wu et al 2016).Ciaran OF (2010)) defined public participation in environmental governance as any form of interaction between the government and public that may influence the processes of environmental impact assessment.Public participation behaviors, such as environmental complaints, reports and complaints, and administrative litigation, as primary forms to participate in environmental governance, can effectively improve the effect of environmental regulation and safeguard the public's environmental rights and interests (Hinrich 2014, Ouyang et al 2016, Tu et al 2019).Environmental litigation can provide effective information to regulators and reduce regulatory costs (Dasgupta et al 1999, Warwick andOrtolano 2007).To avoid environmental litigation affecting social stability, the government will actively increase expenditures on environmental governance to improve environmental quality (Lu and Tsai 2017).
However, according to some research, as the representative means of public participation in environmental governance, there may not be a significant negative correlation between public participation in environmental litigation and pollution emissions (Pruitt and Sobczynski, 2016).The main reason for this is that the public's demand for environmental litigation has not yet been satisfied.The CLEAR model establishes a key path to stimulate public participation in environmental litigation, in which one of the main factors is to provide a positive and forceful response to public behavior (Arshad and Khurram 2020).Legislative and political supports can provide approaches in communicating with authorities (Petts 2003).The public has fully expressed their opinions by participating in hearings, trials, and lawsuits, and as a response, the government heeds public suggestions to enhance the administrative capacity and efficiency of law enforcement (Zuo and Li 2016).When the government supports environmental litigation and provides feedback on time, public participation becomes active (Wu et al 2018).After the rise of Internet technology, the interaction between the public and government in the network environment also affects the implementation effect of environmental litigation (Fedorenko and Sun 2016).
A Lot of literatures did researches on the public participation in environmental governance.Wu et al (2018) analyzed the impacts of public participation on environmental performance, finding that there is a significant correlation between environmental petitions and environmental pollutants.Tu et al (2019) claimed that there is a positive influence of public participation on pollution emission reduction, but the influence may be overstated.Zeng and Hu (2015) pointed out that economic condition, environmental pollution, and governmental regulations are the influence factors of environmental public participation.Internet usage is a critical factor on public satisfaction with environmental governance (Fedorenko andSun 2016, Tang et al 2021).With the expanding influence of media, media reports on the environment have improve environmental governance (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010).Taking environmental courts as empirical samples, Zhang et al (2019) evaluated the real effects of environmental justice reform on environmental governance.
To promote public participation in environmental litigation and improve the governance effect of public participation in environmental litigation, our study investigates the influence of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation.The section on further discussion digs out the improvement path of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection, providing viable suggestions for the standardized development of environmental governance.The marginal contribution of this paper lies in two points.First, it answers the question that how to improve the enthusiasm of public participation in environmental litigation, analyzes the influence factors of environmental litigation from the legal aspect and administrative aspect, especially the cross-effect of public trust in government environmental protection and legalization levels which the previous literatures ignored.Second, it digs out the improvement path of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection, provides Chinese empirical evidence on improvement of environmental governance.

Public participation in environmental litigation
When the public is faced with environmental pollution, they usually sue directly to the court with the polluter as the defendant.However, in reality, besides direct litigation, some indirect participation in environmental litigation exists.Because environmental problems have a significant spillover effect, there is a large number of public suffering from the same environmental pollution.Those people participate in environmental litigation in the form of joint litigation that entrust someone or a small group to initiate a lawsuit, while others trace the process of litigation and provide out-of-court assistance.The out-of-court assistance belongs to the indirect participation.In our study, public participation in environmental litigation includes the direct lawsuits the public takes and indirect participation.
According to China Judgements Online, 1 noise pollution, water pollution, housing and land pollution are the three main types of environmental pollution in China.When specific individual's environmental interests are infringed, he or she would take litigation alone.In a noise pollution case in Shanghai, the accuser filed a case against the defendant because the noise pollution caused by the defendant's construction lead to the accuser's cerebral congestion.However, when the victims are more than one person, joint litigation is necessary.In a serious criminal environmental pollution case in Hangzhou, the victims were more than 30, and the defendants were over 20.The victims appointed three lawyers to take charge of the proceedings, many victims appeared in the court even as witnesses rather than accusers.
In 2022, 2357 cases related to environmental pollution have been adjudicated.Among them, there are 2141 civil cases, taking 90.84% in total cases, which may come to a rough conclusion that the situation of public participation in environmental litigation in China is good.However, when we take a careful look, the situation is not so good.The accuser of a civil case is natural or legal person, legal person represents whole company who holds more resources and power than natural person dose.Natural person is more likely to give up settling environmental pollution dispute by litigation for illegal interference or economic reasons.In 2141 civil cases, the cases in which the accuser is natural person are only 843, no more than 40%.It illustrates that we still need to make big effort on public participation in environmental litigation.

Legalization level
Environmental litigation is related to legal behavior.An improvement in the legalization level may have a positive impact on public participation in environmental litigation.
Environmental litigation is based on legal provisions that have strict procedural and mandatory characteristics.As adjudicators, courts play a crucial role in trails.A high level of legalization means that there is little or no illegal interference in court trials, and external factors such as personal relationships or administrative pressure should not be considered in trials.However, it is usually found that local government intervene in environmental enforcement (Kostka 2014, Wunderlich 2017).The defendants in environmental litigations are often the great contributors of local finance and tax revenue (Zhang et al 2019).Because the main index of the performance evaluation to local government leaders is GDP growth (Wang et al (2020)), local governments have a strong incentive to shelter these polluters.If the court ignores the public's reasonable needs, takes sides in defending polluters, or maliciously delays the trial process because of illegal interference, public participation in environmental litigation is severely discouraged.
Hypothesis H1 : Less illegal interference, higher enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.
In addition to external factors, such as illegal intervention, some inevitable internal factors in the process of litigation hinder public participation in environmental litigation (Zuo and Li 2016).
At the beginning of litigation, in the absence of relevant knowledge, it is difficult for the public to rely on their personal ability to collect comprehensive infringement evidence, which results in the failure to file a case.Even the case files successfully, and the court adjudicated the case, the public may lose the case because of insufficient evidence.Take Shanghai province as example, in 2022, 15 cases related to environmental pollution have been adjudicated.In 5 out of 15 cases, the defendant is legal person and zthe accuser is natural person.3 cases ended up with loss, 1 case was withdrawn.The reasons of 3 lost cases were all that the accusers failed to provide evidence.
In the process of litigation, the public must bear the relevant litigation fees and time consumption caused by the long trial process.Based on trial principle, it requires the monitoring and identification for the evidence of environment pollution, for the causal relationship between the defendant's discharge and the accuser's injury, and the reasonability of compensation (Tu et al 2019).According to statistics from the Supreme People's Court in China, the average trial time of environmental cases in Shanghai is over 3 months, more than double the average trial time.The Legal Assistance Center for Pollution Victims at the China University of Political Science and Law usually takes three to five years to settle an environmental litigation (Wang and Feng 2016).A person who is not in a good economic situation or short of time is unable to pay such costs.
At the end of litigation, even if the public wins the trail, a situation still exists in which the defendants do not execute the judgment or delay the execution.The decentralization of environmental administrative enforcement powers across different government departments and weak enforcement power for environmental justice lead to a weak execution (Zhang et al 2019).In 2017 in Fujian Quanzhou, Prosecutors filed 14 public interest lawsuits with the court.To 2020, only 4 cases have been finished the execution, 8 cases have not been completed the execution and 1 case has not been executed.When the public takes a pessimistic attitude toward an execution situation, it is likely to give up litigation.
Hypothesis H2 : Less difficulty in filing a case, higher enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.
Hypothesis H3 : Less economic and time costs, higher enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.
Hypothesis H4 : Better execution situations, higher enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.

Public trust in government environmental protection
As a representative of national power, to some degree, the government is worth relying on and trusted to provide resources and capabilities that individuals cannot obtain (Paton et al 2008).Trust, as the most important part of social capital, leads to an important result -public participation (Uslaner 2002).Li (2008) did some research on the public trust and petition in China, finding that high trust in government encourages farmers to petition.Adaman et al (2011) also found that there is a positive correlation between institutional trust and public environmental protection behavior.Faced with social problems alone, the public is more likely to seek help from the government and various organizations (Zhao et al 2022).When the public believes that the government is inclined to protect individual environmental rights, they believe that the court holds the same behavioral preference and are more willing to take environmental litigation actions.
H5: Higher public trust in government environmental protection, enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.

Data
The main research data came from Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), covering 28 provinces, excluding Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region and Hainan Province.2086 valid samples were obtained after removing missing values and invalid data.Data on environmental litigation, illegal interference, difficulty in filing a case, economic and time cost, execution situation, public trust in government environmental protection, and individual characteristics were collected from questionnaires, and some missing income variables were supplemented by mean substitution.Macroeconomic data were obtained from the China Urban Statistical Yearbook, environmental data from the China Urban Statistical Yearbook, air quality data from the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and a small amount of missing data from hand-collected environmental bulletins of provincial and prefecture-level cities (Li et al 2015, Wang et al 2023).Further details on the variables and data can be found in appendix A.
We clarify that we used the questionnaire data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) powered by The China Survey and Data Center (NSRC) at Renmin University of China, rather than collected by our research team.CGSS is a national public database with 48 cooperative universities and institutes.The NSRC is responsible for data implementation, management, and release.All participants agreed to be surveyed.Their personal information is protected in accordance with The Statistics Law of China.With regard to its high reliability and efficiency, CGSS has assisted numerous scholars with their scientific activities.We adopted CGSS data for research considering that it is open and free to all scientific institutions. 2

Models
We constructs the Order Probit model for empirical research: 7 Please find the CGSS database at http://cgss.ruc.edu.cn/ Models (1) and (2) test the influence of the legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation, respectively.Models (3) and (4) test the separate effects and cross-effect of public trust in government environmental protection and legalization levels, respectively.
In the models, i represents the ith respondent sample, and j represents the jth residential city.Y ij represents the variable of public participation in environmental litigation, including direct environmental litigation (lawsuit) and tracing the litigation process (attendance).Illegal represents the variable of illegal interference.
Register represents the variable of difficulty in filing a case.Economy represents the variable of economic cost.Time represents the variable of time cost.Execution represents the variable of execution situation.Trust represents the variable of public trust in government environmental protection.Z represents the control variables of the area characteristics.X represents the control variables of individual public characteristics.

Basic regression
Table 1 reports the regression results of the influence of the legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation.The regression results show that illegal interference, difficulty in filing a case, economic cost, and time cost negatively influence enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation 3 , while a good execution situation and public trust in government environmental protection have a positive influence on enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.Therefore, the positive coefficients of the variables of illegal interference, difficulty in filing a case, economic cost, and time cost mean that these four variables negatively influence the enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.
For the 'direct environmental litigation' variable, illegal intervention has the greatest influence, while the difficulty in filing a case has no significant influence.For the variable of 'tracing the process of litigation,' the difficulty in filing a case has the greatest influence, while the economic cost has no significant influence.A possible explanation is that the respondents who directly participate in environmental litigation spend a lot of time and money in the litigation, and they pay more attention to the interference factors that affect the fair judgment of environmental litigation.The respondents who follow the process of litigation play an auxiliary role in environmental litigation, and they pay more attention to whether the case could be filed because it determines whether their follow-up work is necessary.
Columns (4) and (8) test the cross-effects of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on environmental litigation.The regression results show that legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection do not have a significant cross-effect on public participation in environmental litigation.After adding the interaction variables, the coefficients of the legalization level variables increase, which indicates that the improvement of public trust in government environmental protection is beneficial to the legalization level to play a role in environmental litigation.
In general, illegal interference, time cost, execution situation, and public trust in government environmental protection have a significant influence on environmental litigation.For the respondents who directly sue in court, economic cost is another significant factor.For respondents who pay attention to the litigation process, the effect of the difficulty in filing a case is more significant.Legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection have a positive cross-effect on public participation in environmental litigation; however, the cross-effect is not significant.

Endogenous problem of legalization level
In the process of environmental governance, there is a chance that the level of government compliance with the law influences enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.The higher the compliance level, the more trustworthy the government is.As representatives of state authority, there is consistency between judicial and administrative systems.Public trust in the government transfers to the judicial system, which influences the public evaluation of the legalization level and the enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation.Considering the endogenous problems caused by the government's compliance level with the law, we use the PSM method to solve the problem.More details on the PSM balance test can be found in appendix A. PSM eliminated 23 off-support samples, and we used Order Probit regression for the remaining 2063 samples.Table 2 reports the regression results, and it is found that the results have no significant difference between table 2 and table 1.

Endogenous problem of public trust in government environmental protection
Public trust in government environmental protection may also be influenced by trust in other government activities.If the public creates a sense of distrust because of the behavior that the government has taken to deal with other social issues, this distrust may transfer to the government's environmental protection work and cause endogenous problems in (Zuo and Li 2016).
The survey asked respondents 'do you agree with the statement that for some social issues, if the government's statement is different from the online rumors, you would rather believe the online rumors', reflecting the public trust in government other work.The variable of public trust in government and other work was included in the control variables to eliminate its endogenous influence.Table 3 reports the regression results and finds no significant difference between table 3 and table 1.

Robustness test
Similar to government treatment for polluting enterprises, the government's attitude toward environmental governance also reflects its attitude toward environmental protection.If the public believes that the government will input large resources into environmental governance, the public would have a positive evaluation of government environmental protection, which indicates that public trust in government environmental protection would be high.
The survey asked respondents about 'the satisfaction with government performance in environmental governance'.We use satisfaction with government environmental governance instead of attitude toward government treatments for polluting enterprises as the variable of public trust in government environmental protection.Table 4 reports the regression results and finds that there is no significant difference between table 4 and table 1, the results are robust.
3.4.Further discussion on the improvement path 3.4.1.Improvement path of legalization level According to the basic regression results, the reduction of illegal interference and difficulty in filing a case, the reduction of economic and time costs, and a good execution situation are the main legal factors that stimulate public participation in environmental litigation.The environmental court, which is mainly responsible for hearing civil, administrative, and criminal cases and enforcing environmental litigation, has broadened the channel and reduced the cost of public environmental legal behavior (Zhang et al 2019).In the 2086 total samples, 692 subsamples has established environmental courts.
According to the statistics of 692 subsamples, in the survey about 'the effect of litigation when facing environmental problems', 539 samples chose the answers as 'usually effective' or 'always effective', indicating that 33.17% of the total sample contributed 45.07% of the answers as 'good effect of litigation'.Regarding the survey about 'how difficult it is to trace the litigation process', 156 samples chose the answers as 'relatively easy' or 'very easy', indicating that 33.17% of the total sample contributed 72.90% of the answers as 'easy to trace the process of litigation'.The statistical results show that enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation is higher in areas with environmental courts than in areas without environmental courts.

Improvement path of public trust in government environmental protection
According to the regression results, public trust in environmental protection is an important factor in stimulating public participation in environmental litigation.Public trust in environmental protection reflects the public's evaluation of the government's work on environmental protection.When the government fails to take environmental responsibility and correct its mistakes in time, the public evaluation of government environmental protection would be lower (Liu and Liu 2013).On the contrary, when the public finds that the government punishes officials who neglect environmental work and takes remedial actions on environmental work in time, the public evaluation of government environmental protection would be higher.
The survey asked the respondents about 'the opinions on whether government officials would be accountable for environmental deterioration because of neglecting to supervise enterprises' pollution discharge', 547 subsamples chose the answers of 'usually' and 'always'.According to the statistics of 547 subsamples, to the survey about 'the effect of litigation when facing environmental problems', 344 samples chose the answers as 'usually effective' or 'always effective', indicating that 26.22% of the total sample contributed 28.76% of the answers as 'good effect of litigation'.Regarding the survey about 'how difficult it is to trace the litigation process', 80 samples chose the answers as 'relatively easy' or 'very easy', indicating that 26.22% of the total sample contributed 37.38% of the answers as 'easy to trace the process of litigation'.Statistical results show that enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation is higher in areas with greater environmental accountability.

Conclusion and discussion
Environmental pollution is a serious threat to human health.Water pollution, air pollution and noise pollution negatively affect people's physical and mental health (Kampa and Castanas 2008, Schwarzenbach et al 2010, Ebenstein et al 2013, Geravandi et al 2015, Wang et al 2019, José et al 2020).It is necessary to find an effective governance form to solve bad environmental problems.Public participation combines public requirements with government decision-making that can improve social quality condition (Creighton 2005, Lin 2011).Environmental litigation is an important way for public to participate in environmental governance (Pruitt and Sobczynski, 2016).Environmental litigation gives an open and legal channel for public to express their opinions on environmental pollution (Petts 2003), meanwhile the authorities interact with the public in the process of litigation and give a feedback on the public requirements (Arshad and Khurram 2020).
As public participation in environmental litigation is an effective way of environmental governance, it is valuable to discuss how to promote public participation in environmental litigation.Using CGSS sample in China, this paper analyzes the influence of legal level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation.Based on the empirical results, we summarize some conclusions and provide some suggestions for promoting public participation in environmental litigation.
First, public participation in environmental litigation benefits from the improvement of legal level.With less illegal interference and strict judicial execution, public is more confident in environmental litigation.Difficulty in acquisition of sufficient evidence, large economic cost and time cost are other critical factors to prevent public participation in environmental litigation.The authorities should make effort in lowering the threshold for evidence acquisition, and providing free consultation services to the public.In the judicial process, the authorities should stick to independent trials, and reject illegal interference from enterprises or government personnel.
Second, public trust in government environmental protection has a positive effect on public participation in environmental litigation.On one hand, the government should persist in promoting the pace of environmental governance, consistently solving significant environmental problems.On the other hand, the government should attach importance to the image of government environmental work, use various media tools to publicize the government efforts and achievements in environmental protection, and create a good image of environmental governance.
Third, the environmental court system and strong environmental accountability are effective improvement paths of legal level and public trust in government environmental protection.The enthusiasm for public participation in environmental litigation is higher in areas with environmental courts than in areas without environmental courts.The similar results can be concluded in areas with greater environmental accountability.Therefore, the local governments should continue to promote the construction of environmental courts, give environmental courts more cross-regional jurisdiction, and expand its trial influence.Meanwhile, the government should give strict punishment to the defaulting public officials in accordance with disciplinary regulations, correct their defaulting behaviors in the pursuit of economic growth that lead to environmental deterioration.
Not only China, other countries all over the world have discussed the public participation in environmental matters.In 1992, in Rio Declaration, the call for public participation in environmental matters was expressed for the first time at the global level (Mauerhofer 2016).Since then, Europe began a fast progress.Europe implemented the Aarhus Convention to ensure the access and opportunity to justice for public (Wates 2005).There are over 40 parties to have signed the Convention.Public participation in environmental matters increased attention on climate change (Wilson 2010), forests (Blicharska et al 2011), landscape protection (Conrad et al 2011).In America, the progress of public participation is also not bad.In Brazil, public participation was associated closely with the improvement of water supply (Kauark-Leite et al 2008).In Chile, public affected by environmental pollution used litigation tools to solve problems (Akchurin 2023).In US and Canada, it is easy to collect environmental information from public channel (Mulcahy and Clarke 1994).Over 40 countries including Brazil, Chile, India and the Philippines has established more than 1000 environmental courts (Pring and Pring 2016).It is becoming common for public to maintain their rights in environmental courts (Peel andLin 2019, Rodríguez-Garavito 2020).Compared to other countries, China still need to make effort on legislation to ensure public participation in environmental matters.Though China has established environmental courts since 2007, the access to justice for public has limited because of lack of legislation.Different from other countries, besides legal aspect, public participation is associated closely with government environmental behaviors in China.Influenced by the political system and culture traditions, Chinese people always rely on government to solve social problems.We couldn't avoid the consideration of government behaviors when we discuss environmental litigation in China.
There are some limitations in our study.There are some other external influences on legalization level and public trust.Three advantages of environmental courts-centralized trial, the combination of trial and enforcement, and cross-regional jurisdiction-improve the legalization level.The areas with environmental courts may be better at settling environmental litigations.We failed to provide empirical evidence on the effect of environmental courts.The factors influence on public trust in government environmental protection are not only associated to government behaviors and public education, but also to media publicity.The positive media publicity can leave a good impression of government on the public, which may enhance the public trust.We ignore the influence of the media, especially the internet new media, to public trust.Besides that, the third-party and nonprofit organizations is a powerful environmental governance team that can not be ignored.The areas with a strong power of third-party and nonprofit organizations may have less environmental cases.Considering our limitations, we propose several topics for future research.First, to explore an effective way to maximize the influence of environmental courts to promote public participation in environmental governance.Second, to Table A1.The variable selection and data process.

Variables
Selection rules Data processing

Direct environmental litigation
The effectiveness of litigation when facing environmental problems The effectiveness is taken values from low to high as 1 to 5 Tracing litigation process How difficult it is to trace the process of litigation The difficulty is taken values from difficult to easy as 1 to 5 Explanatory variables

Illegal interference
The attitude to the illegal interference in trial The attitude is taken values from serious to slight as 1 to 5 Difficulty in filing a case Whether the reality is consistent with the statement that it is difficult for ordinary people to file a case The difficulty is taken values from difficult to easy as 1 to 5 Economic cost Whether the reality is consistent with the statement that the high fees is charged by the court in litigation The economic cost is taken values from high to low as 1 to 5 Time cost How quickly a verdict will be reached if the resident sues to ask a company to compensate the health loss The time cost is taken values from high to low as 1 to 5 Execution situation What the most likely implementation situation will be, if the polluters do not comply with the judgment The execution situation is taken values from no execution to quick execution as 1 to 5 Public trust in government environmental protection The opinion to the government's actions towards enterprises that discharge waste gas or sewage The public trust is taken values from low to high as 1 to 5 Control variables

Environmental pollution level
Some macro-level factors affect the enthusiasm for the public participation in environmental governance in (Li et al 2015) AQI index

GDP level
The average of the per capita GDP Industrial structure The average of the ratio of total industrial output to GDP Gender Some other influencing factors from the aspects of individual endowments such as gender, age, income level and education level (Wang et al 2023) 'male' = 0, 'female' = 1

Age
The age of the respondents Income level The logarithm of the total income Education level 'no education' = 0, 'college degree and below' = 1, 'bachelor degree and above' = 2 Party identity 'non Communist' = 0, 'communist' = 1 Residential area 'rural' = 0, 'urban' = 1 induce media factor into the research of public participation.Third, to examine the influence of third-party or nonprofit organizations on public participation in environmental governance.

Table 1 .
The influence of legalization level and public trust in government environmental protection on public participation in environmental litigation.

Table 2 .
The endogenous tests for legalization level.

Table 3 .
The endogenous tests for public trust in government environmental protection.Work represents the variable of 'public trust in government other work' in the control variables.*** , ** , * respectively indicate the significance at the level of 1%, 5% and 10%.

Table 4 .
The robustness tests for public trust in government environmental protection.variable of 'the satisfaction with the government performance in environmental governance.' *** , ** , * respectively indicate the significance at the level of 1%, 5% and 10%.