The Autocratic Distributional Dilemma: Party Perks and the Expansion of Public Benefits in China
Maintaining the cohesiveness of the ruling coalition is a fundamental challenge for the survival of autocracies. One theory assumes that political elites join the ruling coalition for the exclusive privileges they cannot enjoy if they are not coalition members. However, this raises questions about the durability of such strategies because autocrats also face pressure to liberalize the state and the economy for the public in exchange for political obedience and cooperation. What strategies are used to recruit and retain political elites while maintaining a continuous expansion of public benefits and public accountabilities? What are the consequences of such strategies?
Substantively, this project is based on the context of anti-corruption and the tightening discipline of officials in China, both of which aim to provide more accountable and better governance to the public at the expense of the private benefits and spoils received by the regime elites. Specifically, this project answers how the Chinese regime continues to attract the elites to join the ruling coalition when the perks are reduced by a series of efforts to limit elites’ spoils and to strengthen the regulations and monitoring over the cadres.
This project proposes a new theory to understand these choices, provide observable propositions, and test them on new evidence. I argue that autocrats use three strategies to create new benefits for elites without harming public support. First, autocrats deprive the public of benefits in less salient areas to compensate the political elites for their losses in salient areas where they no longer have exclusive privileges. Second, autocrats institutionalize the rewards and make credible commitments to regime allies. Third, autocrats create circumstances in which membership in the ruling coalition can be used to provide moral and ideological supremacy and is thus associated with increased social status rather than material benefits.
This project is funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. With both qualitative and quantitative methods utilizing observational data, experimental data, interviews, and archival studies, I have shown that the Chinese regime takes several measures to compensate local officials for their loss of perks. First, it reduces expenses on public welfare to enhance the private welfare of local officials. Second, it reduces the policy concessions made to the public to provide more favorable policy benefits to officials. Moreover, with several survey experiments, I find that these measures are acceptable to the public even if they are aware of the reduction in public benefits.
The proposed book draws on new datasets of anti-corruption, local officials’ behavior, and legislative agendas, a series of survey experiment data, archive documents, and interview materials to provide intellectual value to scholars of political economy and scholars of Chinese politics. It proposes a theory of how authoritarian regimes can keep recruiting and retaining elites when they are under pressure to be more accountable to the public and reduce private perks to the regime elites. This book engages with the literature on authoritarian cooptation and ruling coalitions as well as the literature on Chinese politics, China’s anti-corruption campaign, and its efforts to strengthen central authority and controls.