Does Stricter Enforcement Deliver? Accountability Intensity and Burden-Reduction Policy Outcomes in China

• In Event: Accountable Government

Abstract

Administrative reforms designed to reduce bureaucratic workload frequently fail or produce outcomes contrary to their intent. While the administrative burden literature has richly documented the compliance costs that government processes impose on citizens (Herd & Moynihan, 2018), comparatively little attention has been directed toward an intra-organizational analogue: the burden that reform mandates impose on the officials responsible for executing them.This oversight carries substantive consequences. When burden-reduction policies are enforced through high-powered accountability regimes that rely on coercive performance targets, intensive monitoring, and punitive ex post accountability, the institutional logic of implementation may work directly against the reform's stated objectives.

This study examines China's 2019 nationwide Burden Reduction (JiCeng JianFu) campaign, which sought to curtail formalism and excessive administrative demands on local governments. The central question is whether accountability-driven implementation attenuates, rather than reinforces, the policy's workload-reduction effect. Building on Merton's (1940) formulation of goal displacement and institutional decoupling theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), we argue that rising accountability pressure systematically induces local officials to redirect scarce organizational attention away from substantive workload reduction and toward the management of compliance performance itself. In doing so, officials generate inspection-readiness routines, symbolic reporting, and other forms of red tape (Bozeman, 1993) that reconstitute the very administrative overhead the policy was designed to eliminate.

We construct a multi-modal panel dataset covering 315 Chinese prefectural governments from 2014 to 2024. Bureaucratic workload is measured using high-resolution daily nighttime light (NTL) satellite imagery at government office coordinates, providing an objective, high-frequency proxy for administrative overtime that avoids the social-desirability biases inherent in survey-based approaches. Implementation intensity is captured through a Pressure-oriented Execution Index (PEI), developed by applying structural topic modeling to over 500,000 official government WeChat posts. The index extracts latent signals of supervisory pressure, punitive accountability, and target-based evaluation along both coercive and normative dimensions. A Continuous Difference-in-Differences framework with Callaway–Sant'Anna (2021) estimators is employed to identify the marginal effect of accountability intensity on the reform's workload-reduction dividend.

The 2019 reform produced a statistically significant aggregate reduction in nighttime administrative activity, indicating that the policy achieved at least partial success. This reduction dividend, however, was systematically attenuated by implementation intensity. Each standard-deviation increase in the PEI significantly erodes the workload-reduction effect, and in jurisdictions at the upper tail of the PEI distribution, the dividend is entirely offset, yielding a paradoxical rebound in bureaucratic overtime. This pattern corresponds to the Paradox of Bureaucratic Burden Reduction phenomenon documented qualitatively in the Chinese governance literature.

These findings carry important implications for administrative reform design. They demonstrate that accountability-intensive enforcement can, beyond a critical threshold, transform the instruments of burden reduction into its primary source. For practitioners, this points to a category of governance friction that standard administrative evaluations systematically fail to detect. For scholars, the study extends the administrative burden framework into an intra-organizational dimension and provides large-N causal evidence for goal displacement within hierarchical governance systems.

Authors

• Jiahe Yin, Beijing Normal University, School of Government
  Presenting Author

• Yue Guo, Beijing Normal University, School of Government
  Non-Presenting Co-Author