How Bureaucratic Incentives Shape Repression in China

• In Event: Changing Governance Models in China

Abstract

The literature on government repression has largely focused on cross-national factors such as regime types, institutional constraints on the executive, and proximity to neighboring civil wars as explanations for state violence against civilians. We add to a growing literature on how subnational factors influence repression by focusing on bureaucratic career incentives, which we argue can have a profound impact on the distribution of state repression. Focusing on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s institutions governing stability maintenance and cadre promotion, we hypothesize that the asymmetric distribution of risks in the event of large-scale riots deter officials with promising career prospects from using force, whereas officials with lower career prospects are more indifferent to the use of force. We test this hypothesis by drawing on novel data on the career trajectories of regime officials and a national database of labor protests. We employ two independent research designs: a differences-in-differences (DID) estimator and an instrumental variables approach. The evidence suggests that the promotion prospects of regime officials have a plausibly causal effect on repression. Consistent with our expectations, officials with better promotion prospects are less likely to violently repress protests and more likely to peacefully mediate them. However, officials rely more on repression for protests in separatist regions, consistent with the regime’s hardline stance on this issue.

Authors

• Victor C. Shih, UCSD

• Jonghyuk Lee, University of California, San Diego

• Erin Baggott Carter, University of Southern California