Browsing by Subject "Authoritarian Institutions"

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    A Decentralized Iron Cage: Do Chinese Local Officials Comply with the Central Government?
    (2016) Ge, Haosen

    This paper contributes to the literature in nancial aid and authoritarian institutions.

    For a long time, scholars are debating whether nancial aid is able to facilitate

    development and governance. Though abundant evidence is provided, the answer is

    still inconclusive. On the other hand, scholars investigating China argue that the

    leadership uses various institutions to ensure local ocials' compliance. In this paper,

    we nd that the nancial aid does not bring a positive impact and the central

    government in China does not have enough monitoring capacity to force local o-

    cials to comply. We study a redevelopment program established by Chinese central

    government after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. By adopting a geographic regression

    discontinuity combining with a dierence-in-dierences design, we show that

    the redevelopment program does not signicantly develop the disaster area. On the

    contrary, the evidence implies that the economy in the disaster area is worse after

    receiving the aid. The results imply that local ocials do not follow the central government's

    regulations and misuse the aid money for other purposes. In the future, we

    expect to further investigate through which mechanism do local ocials undermine

    the existing institutions.

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    Nodding or Needling: Analyzing Delegate Responsiveness in an Authoritarian Parliament
    (American Political Science Review, 2010-08) Malesky, EJ; Schuler, P
    Recent scholarship argues that one solution to ensure longevity and economic growth in an authoritarian regime is to co-opt potential opposition by offering them limited policy influence in a national legislature. Although cooptation theory generates a number of predictions for delegate behavior within an authoritarian parliament, the opacity of such regimes has made empirical confirmation difficult. We resolve this problem by exploiting the transcripts of query sessions in the Vietnamese National Assembly, where delegates question the prime minister and Cabinet members on important issues of the day. Using a content analysis of queries, we offer the first empirical test of delegate behavior in nondemocratic parliaments. We find that some delegates exhibit behavior consistent with cooptation theory by actively participating in sessions, demonstrating criticism of authorities, and responding to the needs of local constituents. Such responsiveness, however, is parameterized by regime rules for nominating, electing, and assigning parliamentary responsibilities to individual delegates. © 2010 American Political Science Association.
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    The Adverse Effects of Sunshine: A Field Experiment on Legislative Transparency in an Authoritarian Assembly
    (American Political Science Review, 2012-11) Malesky, EJ; Schuler, P; Tran, A
    An influential literature has demonstrated that legislative transparency can improve the performance of parliamentarians in democracies. In a democracy, the incentive for improved performance is created by voters' responses to newly available information. Building on this work, donor projects have begun to export transparency interventions to authoritarian regimes under the assumption that nongovernmental organizations and the media can substitute for the incentives created by voters. Such interventions, however, are at odds with an emerging literature that argues that authoritarian parliaments primarily serve the role of co-optation and limited power sharing, where complaints can be raised in a manner that does not threaten regime stability. We argue that under these conditions, transparency may have perverse effects, and we test this theory with a randomized experiment on delegate behavior in query sessions in Vietnam, a single-party authoritarian regime. We find no evidence of a direct effect of the transparency treatment on delegate performance; however, further analysis reveals that delegates subjected to high treatment intensity demonstrate robust evidence of curtailed participation and damaged reelection prospects. These results make us cautious about the export of transparency without electoral sanctioning. © 2012 American Political Science Association.