UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates local government accountability in China. Three related chapters, combined, shed light on various issues in authoritarian accountability. Who holds local officials accountable: higher-level leaders (chapters 1 & 2) or the people (chapter 3)? How does the policy dynamic vary by domain: is policy formulation and execution different in the economic (chapter 1) versus the political realm (chapters 2 & 3)? How is accountability affected by stages in the policy process: is responsiveness greater or less during the experimentation (chapters 1 & 2) and implementation (chapters 2 & 3) phase? Each chapter relies on different methodological approaches: formal modeling (chapter1), qualitative historical analysis (chapter 2), and quantitative text analysis (chapter 3).

The first chapter examines how central leaders’ use of ambiguous guidelines shapes local officials’ incentive to undertake economic reform in the course of China’s policy experimentation. Contrary to the lessons of most principal-agent models, Chinese leaders have often provided local officials with ambiguous policy guidelines that do not clarify the boundaries of discretion. While ambiguity can offer local officials flexibility in policy implementation, it can also instill fear of punishment among possible transgressors and encourage preemptive self-censoring. Incorporating both perspectives, this article develops a formal model that analyzes a situation in which ambiguity allows flexibility for certain types of local officials while intimidating others. It argues that central leaders use ambiguity as a screening tool to encourage only “competent” local officials—those who have policy expertise for producing good outcomes—to choose a gray-area policy at their own risk, while deterring “incompetent” officials from doing so. The model is illustrated with a case study of state-owned enterprise restructuring in China. The argument is broadly applicable to interactions between all upper- and lower-level actors in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

The second chapter continues to explore central-local relations in China but turns to the realm of political reform, in an effort to bridge the large literature on policy experimentation and implementation. Studies of local governance in China often point to nimble experimentation but problematic implementation. To reconcile these competing images, it is useful to clarify the concepts of experimentation and implementation and see how they unfolded in one policy area. The history of China’s Open Government Information (OGI) initiative shows that the experimentation stage sometimes proceeds well and produces new policy options, but may falter if local leaders are unwilling to carry out an experiment. And the implementation stage often poses challenges, but may improve if the Center initiates new, small-scale experiments and encourages local innovation. This suggests that the experimentation and implementation stages are not so different when officials in Beijing and the localities have diverging interests and the Center is more supportive of a measure than local officials. The ups and downs of OGI, and also village elections, can be traced to the policy goal of monitoring local cadres, the central-local divide, and the pattern of support and opposition within the state.

The third chapter analyzes the implementation of the OGI policy, drawing attention to the role of citizens. How and when do opportunities for political participation through courts change under authoritarianism? Although China is better known for tight political control than for political expression, the 2008 OGI regulation ushered in a surge of political-legal activism. The article draws on an original dataset of 57,095 OGI lawsuits, supplemented by interview data and government documents, to show how a feedback loop between judges and court users shaped possibilities for political activism and complaint between 2008 and 2019. In contrast to the conventional explanation that authoritarian leaders crack down on legal action when they feel politically threatened, it finds that courts minted, defined and popularized new legal labels to cut off access to justice for the minority of super-active litigants whose lawsuits had come to dominate the OGI docket. This study underscores the power of procedural rules and frontline judges in shaping possibilities for political participation under authoritarianism.