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Promoting City Leaders: The Structure of Political Incentives in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2015

Cai (Vera) Zuo
Cai (Vera) Zuo*
Affiliation:
School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Email: czuo@fudan.edu.cn.
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Abstract

The shift in Beijing's priorities to more balanced and people-oriented development has led some localities to make more efforts in developing social policy areas. By investigating the personnel institution, a political incentive mechanism, this article aims to shed light on the structure of political incentives in China and why local political leaders improve public welfare in a non-democratic setting. A content analysis of 69 regulations that cover one-third of all municipal leaders shows that the formal evaluation rules for leaders in some localities have become more welfare-oriented to reflect Beijing's new focus on social policy areas. A statistical analysis further reveals that different political incentives operate for municipal Party leaders and mayors, and that political incentives to develop social policy vary across geographic regions. The statistical analysis exploits an original dataset I compiled from an online archive and statistical yearbooks, and contains biographic and career history data on municipal leaders between 2003 and 2010.

摘要

随着中央政府对民生领域的逐渐重视, 一些地方政府开始发展社会政策领域的创新。通过研究地方人事制度这一政治激励机制, 这篇文章旨在促进对地方领导人政治动机结构以及集权体制下领导人发展社会福利的理解。通过对69条地方人事考核条例的内容分析, 作者发现一些地方人事考核制度变得更加强调民生领域的发展。对2003年到2010年地级市领导人晋升影响因素的统计分析显示影响地级市市委书记和市长晋升的因素不同以及促进民生发展的政治动机存在地域差异。

Keywords

political elitewelfare provisionChinapersonnel institutions政治精英福利提供中国政治人事制度
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 224 , December 2015 , pp. 955 - 984
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Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I greatly appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions from Melanie Manion, Edward Friedman, Yoshiko Herrera, Sida Liu, David Weimer, the anonymous reviewers and editors at The China Quarterly, and panel and seminar participants at the 2014 Annual MPSA Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Peking University. I also thank Yaojiang Shi, Ming Yang, Baishun Yuan and Shukai Zhao for their help during the fieldwork. I am grateful to the support from the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology during the manuscript revision, and the financial support of the Doctoral Dissertation Research Scholarship from the China Times Cultural Foundation. All errors remain my own.

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