Recent scholarship suggests that authoritarian leaders may use seemingly democratic institutions to strengthen their own rule. In this vein, China’s leaders attempted to rein in local governments by introducing new transparency regulations, with environmental transparency a key focus. However, implementing these requirements necessitates cooperation from the very actors who may be weakened by them. Surprisingly, more industrial or more polluted cities were no slower in implementing environmental transparency than cleaner ones, with pollution measured using satellite data in order to avoid relying on questionable official sources. However, cities dominated by large industrial firms lagged in implementing environmental transparency, and this effect appears strongest when a city’s largest firm is in a highly polluting industry. Our findings demonstrate that even institutional innovations designed to preserve authoritarian rule can face significant challenges of implementation.
List-based samples are often biased because of coverage errors. The problem is especially acute in societies where the level of internal migration is high and where record keeping on the population is not reliable. We propose a solution based on spatial sampling that overcomes the inability to reach migrants in traditional area samples based on household lists. A comparison between a traditional study and our sample of Beijing demonstrates that coverage bias is greatly reduced. The successful incorporation of mobile urban residents has important substantive effects, in both univariate and multivariate analyses of public opinion data.
Using a 2004 survey of over 1,000 children in a multi-ethnic county of Yunnan province, this article demonstrates how household and village assets operate in gender distinct ways to promote school enrolment in an era of economic privatization and skewed sex ratios. As expected, parental and village wealth facilitate enrolment, but parental wealth is far more decisive for girls than boys. Similarly we find a gender difference in the impact of such parental cultural capitals as education and membership in the Communist Youth League. For a daughter, having a father with higher than average levels of education and past membership in the Youth League facilitates enrolment independent of household wealth; for sons the impact of father's cultural capital is positive but less decisive. Having a more educated mother or a mother who was in the Youth League also promotes a child's enrolment but not as significantly as father's assets. In conclusion, the article considers why parents' involvement in the Youth League during their own adolescence but not their current Communist Party membership facilitates school enrolment, and the broader social and political implications for the role of the Communist Party in rural society.
Political selection is central to the survival of all regimes. This article evaluates the relative importance of performance and political connection for the advancement of local politicians under authoritarianism. We hypothesize that in a large-scale multilevel polity, economic performance plays a greater role in promotion at lower administrative levels of government than at higher ones, even after controlling for political connections. This dualist strategy allows the ruling elites to achieve economic performance while minimizing the advancement of potentially disloyal challengers. Thus, balancing between loyalty and competence among subordinates enhances regime survival. Our empirical evidence draws on a comprehensive panel dataset of provincial, prefectural, and county-level Communist party secretaries and government executives appointed between 1999 and 2007. We find consistent evidence for our argument under various model specifications. We also explore the heterogeneous effects of performance on promotion given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) age ineligibility rule for cadre promotion and jurisdiction characteristics.
Exogenous shocks are said to play a key role in the breakdown of authoritarian regimes. This paper sheds light on the conditions under which crisis management play out to the advantage of authoritarian leaders, or not. By chance, a national probability survey of the Chinese population was conducted before and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Based on a quasi-experimental design that allows us to match pre- and post-quake respondents, we find that citizens were highly responsive to media content. In the short run, a more open information policy helped shore up support for a government that exhibited a high degree of responsiveness to the crisis. We find, however, that this approach may have undermined the regime’s legitimacy. Whereas in the immediate aftermath of the quake the Chinese media emphasized political unity and harmony, over time increasing and unusual criticisms of local governments in the media eroded public confidence. Even though support for political unity and harmony increased immediately after the quake, it quickly dropped below pre-quake levels. Our results are robust both to matching and to more standard parametric specifications.
This paper evaluates long-term political consequences of severe economic shocks by combining a nationally-representative survey of Russians’ political behaviors with long-term subnational economic data tracing Russia’s post-Soviet economic transition. We show that the shock of transition has durably activated a limited but important sub-population of Russians while deactivating others. Surprisingly, much of the variation in contemporary political participation across Russia’s population can be explained by local economic conditions experienced by Russians in the early 1990s: Durable patterns of participation seem to have been “locked in” by economic trauma early in the transition period and are not influenced by the subsequent post-Soviet economic recovery or contemporary economic conditions.
Download This Paper Open PDF in Browser Add Paper to My Library Share: Permalink Using these links will ensure access to this page indefinitely Copy URL Copy DOI
Recent transparency reforms in China are intended in part to help activists, journalists, and others to limit the ability of the local party-state to engage in practices that not only harm ordinary Chinese but also go against central government interests. However, implementing these reforms requires cooperation from the very actors who may be weakened by them. We show that even controlling for pollution, development, and industrialization, Chinese cities dominated by large industrial firms are less transparent than those with a less-concentrated industrial base. This effect is stronger when the city’s largest firm is in a highly polluting industry. We control for pollution using satellite-generated data in order to avoid relying on questionable official data that may be manipulated by local governments. While the negative economic consequences of the dominance of large state-connected firms have been widely discussed, our study shows that this growth strategy has important and deleterious political effects as well.
'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(23.036 .093 25.536)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(45.87 1.273 16.18)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(69.945 .996 12.078)'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23a' transform='rotate(20.66 -19.689 31.932)'/%3e%3c/svg%3e)
'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23b' transform='rotate(10)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23c' transform='rotate(20)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23d' transform='rotate(40)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23e' transform='rotate(-80)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cpath d='M-225-21.5h450v7.5h-450z'/%3e%3cpath fill='%23339E35' d='M-225 86h450v100h-450z'/%3e%3c/svg%3e)