Subnational Party Institutionalization and its Mitigation Effect on Corruption

• In Event: Corruption in China

Abstract

While cross-national studies agree that strong and more institutionalized authoritarian ruling parties benefit authoritarian survival, there is little work that explores how the variation of subnational party institutionalization influences regional stability. This paper examines how the level of subnational party institutionalization influences corruption’s impacts on protests. While corruption breeds government discontent and increases the possibility of anti-government protests, I posit that subnational party institutionalization reduces corruption-bred protests via three potential mechanisms: first, provinces with higher level of party institutionalization has more precise rules that regularize the interaction between citizens and bureaucrats, which makes corruption predictable and reduces anti-government grievance; second, these provinces have more party members that share the economic benefits of corruption; and, finally, these provinces channel citizens’ dissent into party-led policy changes. This paper measures subnational party institutionalization in China through the proportion of localists in the provincial standing committee, the proportion of party members, and the proportion of voter nominees in township congress elections. Using a new latent measure of corruption based on news reports from 2010 to 2015, this paper finds that while corruption increases protests, provincial-level party institutionalization mitigates the effect of corruption, thus ensuring local stability.
 

Author

• Min Rosemary Pang, Penn State University