Making Bureaucracy Work: Patronage Networks, Performance Incentives, and Economic Development in China
By Junyan Jiang. American Journal of Political Science, 2018
314 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Patron–client networks are widely found in governments of transitional societies and are often seen as an impediment to effective governance. This article advances an alternative view that emphasizes their enabling effects. I argue that patron–client relations can be used to improve government performance by resolving principal–agent problems within political hierarchies. I substantiate this claim by examining how patronage networks shape economic performance of local governments in China. Using an original city–level panel data set between 2000 and 2011, and a new method that identifies patronage ties based on past promotions, I show that city leaders with informal ties to the incumbent provincial leaders deliver significantly faster economic growth than those without. I conduct additional analyses to rule out several important alternative explanations and provide evidence on the incentive‐enhancing mechanism. These findings highlight the importance of informal institutions for bureaucratic management and authoritarian governance.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21a99a85c09d777534d3d232e77c3c9bc1d5dfa6
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Citations in the corpus
- Subnational Debt of China: The Politics-Finance Nexus (2016, methodology): “The number 12 Jiang (2018) and Jiang and Zeng (2020) use the same method to build the informal inter-politician network in China and find that this network plays an essential role in China’s economic activities.”