Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Informal Foundation of Authoritarian Resilience

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary The political durability and economic accomplishments of authoritarian regimes under the single-party government have long interested social scientists and policymakers, especially since these regimes lack the liberal institutionalism that scholars typically associate with development and good governance. This project seeks to cast a new perspective on single-party government resilience by probing the informal dimension of the system. More specifically, it focuses on how networks of patron-client relations structure political interactions among party elites and shape the broader patterns of political and economic development at both the national and subnational levels. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that views informal, clientelistic relations as primarily a cause for corruption, political instability and economic decay, this project argues that they actually contribute to the single-party government's resilience by serving as a key organizational mechanism that mobilizes, incentivizes, and coordinates actors in a system where the formal institutions are poorly equipped to perform such functions. Using China as the case of interest, this project contributes to a growing body of research on the role of informal institutions in political and economic governance. The project also offers new data and methods for reconstructing the social world of Chinese political elites since the 1990s. Technical Summary This project seeks to cast a new perspective on single-party government resilience by probing the informal dimension of the system. The research project seeks to systematically measure the presence of informal networks among Chinese elites and evaluate their impacts on the following four dimensions: (1) political institutionalization, (2) economic development, (3) policy implementation, and (4) anticorruption enforcement. The main quantitative evidence is drawn from an original biographical database of over 4,000 politicians at city, provincial, and national levels since early 1990s. The project develops new automated algorithms for identifying patron-client ties by linking lower-level officials with political superiors who oversaw their major promotions in the past, and leverages carefully chosen natural experiments to estimate the causal effects of informal networks. To supplement the quantitative analyses, the PI will also conduct in-depth interviews with serving and retired officials in both central and local governments, and collects additional historical and archival materials during his fieldwork in China.