(iPoster) Does Halting Institutional Adaptation Weaken Authoritarian Resilience?

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy I

Abstract

The lack of institutional adaptations is often considered a key factor undermining authoritarian resilience. However, empirical evidence from village elections in China challenges this assumption. In the 1980s, around 700,000 village governments adopted competitive elections. Starting in 2013, the CCP gradually phased out these elections through the “One Shoulder Pole” policy. By 2019, over 90% of villages had implemented this policy, effectively replacing direct voting with government appointments for village committee leadership.

Surprisingly, the cessation of competitive elections, a typical type of institutional adaptation, has not led to increased resistance in China. Instead, many villagers expressed higher satisfaction with local governments that enacted policies such as the “Targeted Poverty Alleviation Policy” or the “Rural Revitalization Strategy.” This counterintuitive phenomenon highlights the dual nature of institutional adaptations in authoritarian regimes.

We propose a theory to explain this counterintuitive phenomenon. We argue that institutional adaptation operates as a double-edged sword in authoritarian regimes. While it introduces Pareto improvements to society, these seemingly democratic benefits are often short-lived, ultimately overshadowed by adverse effects stemming from the self-limiting by-design nature of such adaptation. Over time, the population may come to view these adaptive institutions as less effective, perceiving them instead as burdensome structures they wish to discard. At this point, discontinuing adaptive institutions becomes a dominant strategy for autocrats. This strategy is more likely to gain support from the masses rather than face resistance, as autocrats can immediately provide benefits that surpass the capabilities of constrained institutional adaptations. This allows the regime to demonstrate that institutional adaptations remain subordinate to the original authoritarian framework, thereby consolidating rather than weakening its political system halting adaptive institutions.

Authors

• John James Kennedy, University of Kansas

• Jingran Yang, University of Kansas