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The impacts of environmental governance on political turnover of municipal party secretary in China

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Abstract

Political incentive is one of the most efficient methods to promote local officials to push for both economic growth and environmental progress in the context of China. Since previous scholars have never investigated the relationships between political turnover and environmental governance at the municipal level, in this work, we proxy pollution by SO2, COD, SOOT, and NHx and examine whether environmental performance affects the political turnover of the municipal party secretary by exploiting a panel conditional logit with a fixed-effect model for the period 2002–2013. The results indicate that environmental performance does not significantly impact the turnover of municipal party secretaries, offering evidence that an increase of SO2 is associated with the likelihood of promotion under the panel multinomial logit approach. However, a higher GDP growth rate plays the determinant factor affecting the promotion of China’s municipal party secretaries. Specific policy recommendations are proposed in accordance with our empirical findings.

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Notes

  1. The terminated cases include officials who are replaced, retired, or moving to the same level.

  2. Qian and Xu (1993) similarly prove the existence of “political tournaments.” Their research investigates that the multidivisional-form structure allows local officials to compete with each other for opportunities of promotion through yardstick competition.

  3. However, when the local economic growth target is low, there is no significant relationship between complete proportion and probability of political promotion.

  4. See the details in Jia (2012).

  5. The municipal party secretary is the most influential official in a local government (Li and Zhou. 2005).

  6. The variables that hardly vary over time thus should be excluded in the model (Mierau et al. 2007).

  7. One of the most important measurements of the promotion mechanism of party officials is “the contingent of cadres should become younger in age”. There is a preferential policy towards senior cadres of CCYL during the process of cadre cultivation and selection. This causes government officials among the same level of cadres, which have the advantage of age, to mostly be members of CCYL.

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Acknowledgements

Chun-Ping Chang thanks the financial supports from College of Social Sciences,National Sun Yat-sen University; and The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, Shaanxi, China

    Gen-Fu Feng, Minyi Dong & Jun Wen

  2. Shih Chien University at Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung 845, Taiwan

    Chun-Ping Chang

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  1. Gen-Fu Feng
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  2. Minyi Dong
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  3. Jun Wen
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  4. Chun-Ping Chang
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Correspondence to Chun-Ping Chang.

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Responsible editor: Nicholas Apergis

Appendix

Appendix

Table 8 Definition of variables and data sources
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Feng, GF., Dong, M., Wen, J. et al. The impacts of environmental governance on political turnover of municipal party secretary in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 25, 24668–24681 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-2499-8

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