Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate under which conditions non-democratic political regimes are capable of making credible commitments to maintain a certain level of local autonomy and to incentivize local bureaucrats. For this purpose, we compare two big non-democratic countries—Russia and China. While China has managed to establish a relatively stable system, with substantial decision-making rights resting with sub-national governments, in Russia relations between the center and the regions have been highly unstable and driven primarily by the extent to which central elites consolidated their power. We argue that China has been able to make credible commitments because its non-democratic rule is based on competition between vertical elite networks that span regional and central political arenas, and because the country has limited access to natural resources: these two characteristics explain the difference between the two cases we investigate.
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Notes
Generally speaking, for non-democratic regimes providing any form of credible policy commitments is a very difficult task. The search for conditions under which non-democracies can make credible commitments has recently attracted substantial scholarly attention (Brennan 1990; Olson 1993; North 1993; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Haber et al. 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006; Desai et al. 2009; Besley and Kudamatsu 2008; Wright 2008; Magaloni 2008; Fang and Owen 2011; Congleton 2011; Gehlbach and Keefer 2011; Boix and Svolik 2013; Pepinsky 2014). Our paper can be seen as a further contribution to these studies. .
For the case there is a single group controlling the highest political office, Congleton (2012) shows that this group may be interested in minimizing rent extraction at lower levels of government, but would not impose any restrictions on predation of the high-level officials themselves.
Resource control is not linked to a specific level of administration. It can be transferred and re-transferred from central to local levels, that is, to any of the following agencies: the province, district, county or villages and townships. It is for this reason the literature speaks about central-local relations rather than being specific about national—sub-national levels (Wong 2002).
As best described in the novels by Qiu Xiaolong, for example in The Mandarin Dress (Qiu 2007).
As a caveat, our observations for Russia apply primarily to the vertical mobility of the highest-level regional and federal officials—the governors and the ministers. An interesting research question would be to look at vertical mobility of lower-level regional officials to lower-level federal positions within more ‘technical’ segments of the bureaucratic hierarchy, and its ability to contribute to the formation of vertical elite networks. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence in this respect.
For China one has to distinguish between local identities within the Han Chinese, which are very strong and form the basis of Chinese politics, and ethnic identities of groups different from Han Chinese. In Russia local identities of ethnic Russians are almost absent, but ethnic identities resulted in the formation of ethnic elites.
Even if capital and labor mobility increased, the result would be the outflow of capital to the relatively rich resource regions (which, in turn, would also create disincentives for resource-poor regions to engage in predatory policies, see Cai and Treisman 2005).
The Tuimen oblast, which officially also includes two subordinate regions—Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrugs.
This is an option unfeasible for Russia due to the bad demographic situation in ethnic Russian regions (e.g. Heard and Aldis 2003).
A striking difference to Russia, where the threat of secessionism was discussed even for ethnic Russian regions (Furman 2010).
For the Soviet period, Qian et al. (2006) explain it also by the organization of the Soviet planned economy as opposed to the Chinese one.
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The authors are very grateful to the participants of the ECSPC conference in Freiburg (May 2013), to the Editor and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, which were crucial for us in terms of advancing and sharpening our argument, as well as to Jo Chipperfield and Marlene Hiller for editing our text.
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Krug, B., Libman, A. Commitment to local autonomy in non-democracies: Russia and China compared. Const Polit Econ 26, 221–245 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9181-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9181-z