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Political Incentives and Local Policy Innovations in China

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Abstract

The government system of China has been well known for its ability to mobilize its local leaders through career incentives. Does this system also encourage local policy innovation? This paper tests the relation between career advancement and local policy innovation with a self-compiled dataset on local innovation and local leaders’ career paths in 16 deputy-provincial level municipalities. We find a strong positive relationship between reported local policy innovation concerning economic issues and local leaders’ career advancement from 1980 to 2008, while the relationship between the number of innovations in other policy areas and promotion is insignificant. This finding deepens our understanding of both the promotion system for Chinese local leaders and motivations for local policy innovation.

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Notes

  1. This letter was published in Li’s semi-autography and titled as “Achievement of reform is produced by many cadres and people”. Li Changchun [16], Tide of Reform in Liaoning

  2. For example, while both Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji worked in Shanghai together, it’s hard to use the name “Shanghai Gang” to brand both.

  3. Chongqing’s administrative rank was lifted up to ministry-provincial level in 1997. We exclude it from our sample since 1997.

  4. Admittedly, not all municipalities had deputy-provincial administrative rank through the sampling years. It is as late as 1995 that official document has recognized these 16 cities as deputy-provincial level. However, historically, all these 16 municipalities have been treated differently especially in cadre management. A common practice is to have leaders with deputy-provincial administrative rank appointed to be party secretary and mayor for these cities.

  5. The other is the magazine of Qiushi published twice every month.

  6. We use two datasets to search reports in People’s Daily. People Daily Electronic database (1949–2003) compiled together by People’s Daily Agency, Green Apple Data Center; Newspaper Search Database (1998-now) provided by wisers.com. Consistence of the two datasets have been confirmed with the overlapping years from 1998 to 2003.

  7. We didn’t differentiate local initiated innovations or top-down policy experiments, we define policy innovation as any attempts of trying something new. The search list includes the following words: dapo, gexin, shixing, shidian, chuangxin, shiyan, tansuo, xinbanfa, xinsilu, zhuanhuan

  8. Formally all Chinese local leaders have a fixed term of three or five years subject to reelection, few actually follow the formal five-year cycle.

  9. The one with 10 years tenure is Wang Guoping, then Party Secretary of Hangzhou from 2000 to 2010.

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Correspondence to Ciqi Mei.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 8
figure 8

Perceived Local Innovation in People’s Daily by City: 1993–2002

Fig. 9
figure 9

Perceived Local Innovation in People’s Daily by City: 2003–2008

Table 7 Logistic Regression for Party Secretaries Excluding Shenzhen
Table 8 Logistic Regression for Mayors Excluding Shenzhen
Table 9 Promotion vs Lateral for Party Secretaries Excluding Shenzhen
Table 10 Promotion vs Lateral for Mayors Excluding Shenzhen

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Mei, C., Wang, X. Political Incentives and Local Policy Innovations in China. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 22, 519–547 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-017-9513-8

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