Factions, Local Accountability, and Long-Term Development : County-Level Evidence from a Chinese Province
This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/308341556738437634/Factions-Local-Accountability-and-Long-Term-Development-County-Level-Evidence-from-a-Chinese-Province http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31602 |
| Summary: | This paper investigates, both
theoretically and empirically, the role of factional
competition and local accountability in explaining the
enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development
performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist
armies took over Fujian from the Nationalist control circa
1949, Communist cadres from two different army factions were
assigned as county leaders. For decades the Fujian
Provincial Standing Committee of the Communist Party had
been dominated by members from one particular faction, which
we refer as the strong faction. Counties also differed in
whether there was local guerrilla presence prior to the
Communist takeover. The model predicts that county leaders
from the strong faction were less likely to pursue policies
friendly to local development, because their political
survival relied more on their loyalty to the provincial
leader than on the grassroots support from local residents.
In contrast, the political survival of county leaders from
the weak faction was based more on local grassroots support,
which could be best secured if these leaders focused on
local development. In addition, the local guerrilla presence
in the county further improved the development performance
either because it intensified local accountability of the
county leader, or because it better facilitated the
provision of local public goods beneficial to development.
The paper finds consistent and robust evidence supporting
these assumptions; being affiliated with weak factions and
having local accountability are both associated with sizable
long-term benefits in terms of growth, education,
private-sector development, and survival in the Great
Famine. The paper also finds that being affiliated with the
strong faction and adopting pro-local policies are
associated with higher likelihood of political survival. The
empirical findings here suggest that factional competition
contributes to efficiency in non-democratic countries, and
that local accountability is a key ingredient for balanced development. |
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