Sweeping Away the “Blacks”: Policy Compliance of Authoritarian Bureaucrats

• In Event: Corruption in China

Abstract

Administrative effectiveness is important for the survival of authoritarian regimes, because autocrats can never rule by their own. Bureaucrats’ compliance to government orders and implementation of policies pave the foundation of administrative effectiveness. However, policy compliance is not as high as claimed despite all the carrots and sticks to manage bureaucrats in authoritarian regimes. While open exit from office or voice out disagreement is rare, authoritarian bureaucrats tend to deviate with implicit incompliance, or falsified compliance, that is essential incompliance with compliance to policies in appearance.
Existing research touches upon this phenomenon by discussing delayed policy implementation, selective implementation, distortion, and formalism. However, because of the difficulty of quantifying policy responses, few studies take various types of policy responses as a whole to compare different categories of incompliance and study the factors affecting the selection of incompliance means systematically.
The campaign to sweep away the “black” and eliminate the evils (SABEE) initiated in January 2018 by the Chinese government offers an ideal opportunity to study the question. Going after the “protective umbrella” (i.e. corruption local officials protecting local criminals), the central policy has potential conflicts of interest with local officials, especial the public security forces. Meanwhile, the policy identifies multiple targets, such as underground society, financial fraud etc., which leaves room for local maneuvering.
Take the advantage of the text analysis method, we plan to measure level of compliance to central government policies by different local governments. We will collect speeches by central, provincial and prefectural governments on SABEE, and extract themes from each speech using topic modeling to form a prefectural level panel data. Using the percentage of policy goal overlap and policy goals ranking similarity as two measures for distance of policy goals (Dependent Variable), we can test the effect of a series of potential explanatory variables, such as promotion incentive, local factions, central inspection and peer pressure on bureaucrats’ policy responses.

Authors

• Jiangnan Zhu, The University of Hong Kong

• siqin kang, University of Hong Kong