Supporting Data for: Soft law, hard transparency: How a non-binding disclosure template shapes budget visibility of the Chinese Communist Party

Specifically, all final accounts were downloaded directly from official local government websites, typically under sections titled “Budget and Final Account Disclosure” (yujuesuan gongkai). These documents were normally compiled and published by the local government finance departments in various formats, including Excel, Word, editable PDFs, and webpages, with a tiny number disclosed as scanned PDFs or images.

For scanned files and images, the content was first converted into Excel format. From each final account, the section detailing public budget expenditure items (zhichu juesuan biao) was extracted. Note that the public budget expenditure items were disclosed at either the corresponding level and/or the general level by each government, under the column "General level_一般公共预算支出决算_text_1" and "Corresponding_level_本级一般公共预算支出决算_text_2" respectively.