Can Authoritarian Government Be Held Accountable? Causal Evidence from China

• In Event: Accountability in Hybrid and Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Accountability is one of the hallmarks of democracy, achieved through a chain of delegation from voters to legislators, government heads, and public servants. By contrast, authoritarian states typically rely on administrative control to rule. Lower-level governments are deemed accountable to upper-level governments, with power eventually concentrated in the hands of the ruling class at the top. What does this institutional difference mean for government accountability? Is authoritarian government accountable? If so, what factors affect government accountability in authoritarian contexts?

I propose a contingent accountability theory to answer these questions. Because authoritarian states are typically organized like a pyramid system and are run through administrative control, hierarchy is the key to understanding accountability. I theorize that the extent of government accountability in authoritarian settings is contingent on the level of government which invokes the accountability procedure. Controlling for other factors, there will exist less accountability if a lower-level government is in charge of the investigation and sanction as opposed to an upper-level government. Two mechanisms may be at work. The punishment effect means that upper-level governments overly sanction lower-level counterparts to uphold their legitimacy, while the protection effect indicates that local government leaders tend to harbor public employees in their jurisdictions due to a patron-client relationship.

I test this theory by focusing on government accountability in China through the lens of disasters, which pose serious challenges to authoritarian rule and make accountability particularly salient. To that end, I have built an original dataset of over 1,000 man-made disasters such as industrial explosions that took place in the past two decades in China. Capitalizing on the disaster classification system, I utilize a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to explore how investigation authority affects sanctions against public employees. Empirical analyses show that all else equal, fewer government officials are held accountable and are disciplined to a lesser extent when the investigation into the disaster is decentralized to lower-level governments. This study will further analyze whether the punishment effect or protection effect (or both) leads to the result.

This study advances our understanding of authoritarian survival by uncovering the logic of government accountability in one of the most resilient authoritarian states. It provides evidence for China’s government accountability in cases of disasters. However, the level of accountability is contingent on administrative authority and it comes at the sacrifice of bureaucratic impersonality. The implication of this study is that although accountability through administrative control serves authoritarian rule for the time being, the punishment and protection effects may impair political legitimacy, bureaucratic morale and mass support in the long run.

Author

• Hui Zhou, University of Houston