文档介绍：Informal Authority,Formal Authority,and Public Goods Provision in Rural China
Informal Authority, Formal Authority, and Public Goods Provision in Rural China
Gerard Padro-I-Miquel
London School of Economics
Nancy Qian
Yale University
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Yiqing Xu and Yang Yao
National School of Development
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China Center for Economic Research
Peking University
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I3>. Motivations
Democracy does not work well in a divided society.
In many cases, it is because the political structure introduced by democracy does not acknowledge the traditional social/political structure.
Main Hypothesis: Democracy works better when the formal authority created by democracy agrees with the informal authority implied by the traditional social/political structure.
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Conflicting evidence
Munshi and Rosenzweig (2008) show that
works embedded in the caste system in rural India improve the efficacy of grassroots democracy in terms of public goods provision by selecting better leaders and disciplining their performance.
Tsai (2007) finds
the presence of solidary groups in Chinese villages, including temples, churches and lineage groups, significantly increases the accountability of village leaders, rendering formal elections unnecessary.
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Aim of the paper
Test our Main Hypothesis using a panel dataset of 250 Chinese villages for the period 1987-2005.
Our main instrument for the measure of the agreement of the formal authority and informal authority is whether the elected village chairperson (VC) comes from the largest surname (joint authority hereafter).
Test alternative explanations, especially Tsai’s proposition of accountability without democracy.
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II. Data and measurements
The National Fixed-point Survey (NFS) provides background data for 250 villages in 29 provinces for the period 1987-2005.
A retrospective survey on the 250 villages in 2006 collecting information on all the elections between 1980 and 2006 as well as supplementary village social-econom