 Land reform, emerging grassroots democracy and political trust in ChinaXing Chen, Jintao Xu, Yuanyuan Yi and Andong Zhuge World Development, 2025, vol. 185, issue C Abstract: This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers’ political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Analyzing a two-period household survey dataset, we find that in China’s recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, which has devolved the tenure rights of the village collective-owned forestland to households, democratic decision-making increases trust for town and county cadres. The impact on trust towards village cadres is significant only when democracy involves all villagers in a village. We show two mechanisms that improve villagers’ trust: the “privatization” effect, where democratic decision-making leads to more land devolved to villagers, and the “conflict-resolving” effect, where improved information and cohesion by mass participation helps resolve inter-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party or village committees. Keywords: Political trust; Grassroots democracy; Land reform; Collective Forest Tenure Reform; China (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:185:y:2025:i:c:s0305750x24002626 DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106792 Access Statistics for this article World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes More articles in World Development from Elsevier |
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