Abstract
Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Using panel data from village elections in China, the OLS regression shows that introducing competitive elections has a relatively small effect on the removal of autocratic incumbents. However, the effect becomes much larger when the endogenous timing is instrumented with the passage of provincial election laws and village-specific election cycles. Additional evidence also suggests that removing incumbents through competitive elections enhances local governance. I interpret these results as suggesting that political selection matters in electoral autocracies.
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Notes
Each province (31 provinces in total) administrates about one hundred counties in rural areas as well as dozens of cities. There are hundreds of villages in each township. Village populations ranges in size from approximately 1,000 to 4,000.
Village levies included accumulating funds for financing public goods, public facilities, and administration costs. Township levies comprised fees for education and family planning plus support for militia training, road construction and military families.
Only in late 1991 did the central government stipulate that the total amount of village and town levies should not exceed 5 % of the net town income per capita in the previous year. (Source: Regulations on peasants’ burden and labor management. The State Council, 1991.) However, the implementation of this stipulation has been questionable.
For the first election held in the village, the question asks whether the elected chair belongs to the pre-election leadership.
This practice is more likely to be seen in large villages. Every 10 or 15 households select one representative, and the assembly of these representatives decide the candidates.
I also use the probit model to check the results. The results are largely consistent with those of the linear probability models.
One of the three committee members is an accountant.
Here this instrumental variable approach works like the encouragement design in a randomized controlled trial, where researchers randomly assign the subjects an encouragement to receive the treatment instead of randomizing over the treatment itself.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Michael Kremer, Rohini Pande, Erica Field for their advice and support. I have also benefited from comments by Gauri Kartini Shastry, Daniel Tortorice, Clement Kirabo Jackson, Elias Bruegmann, Katharine Emans Sims, Erin Strumpf, Quoc-Anh Do, Kai Guo, Tao Li, and participants of the Development lunch workshops at Harvard. All errors are mine.
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Han, L. Are elections in autocracies a curse for incumbents? Evidence from Chinese villages. Public Choice 158, 221–242 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0004-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0004-3