Citizenry Accountability in Autocracies: The Political Economy of Good Governance in China
Mario Gilli and
Yuan Li
Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, 2012, vol. 18, issue 3, 6
Abstract:
Do the citizens have a role in constraining policies in autocratic governments? Usually the political and economic literature model autocracy as if the citizens have no role in constraining leader’s behavior, but actually autocratic government are afraid of possible citizens’ revolts. In this paper we focus on contemporary China to analyze how citizens might induce an autocratic government to adopt congruent policies. Although there is no party or electoral competition, the leader fears deposition by coup d’etat of the selectorate and revolutionary threats from citizens. We build a three player political agency model to study the role of both these constraints and we show that the effectiveness of the selectorate and of revolutionary threats are crucial factors in determining the policy outcomes. In particular, we show that the citizens can effectively discipline the leader because of the revolution threat notwithstanding the selectorate size, but this may result in a failed state when the costs of revolting and the selectorate size are small. As the size of the selectorate and the costs of revolution vary dramatically across countries, our result explain why different types of autocracies arise. In particular our model and results provide a useful framework to interpret China policy in the last twenty years.
Keywords: Autocracy; Accountability; Revolt; Chinese Economic Reform. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2012-0008 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
Related works:
Working Paper: Citizenry Accountability in Autocracies: The Political Economy of Good Governance in China (2012) 
Working Paper: Citizenry Accountability in Autocracies. The Political Economy of Good Governance in China (2012) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:pepspp:v:18:y:2012:i:3:p:1-6:n:7
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/peps/html
DOI: 10.1515/peps-2012-0008
Access Statistics for this article
Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy is currently edited by Raul Caruso
More articles in Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().