E2024009                                                        2024-10-21

Yunnan Guo     Yang Yao

Abstract

Taking advantage of the village elections in rural China, this paper studies whether political decentralization reduce local capture. Exploring a comprehensive dataset spanning from 1986 to 2018, covering the period when elections were rolled out sequentially across the country, we find that the dominant clan --- the largest surname lineage group maintaining an ancestor hall or a genealogy --- enjoys substantial advantages over other clans in office holding and per-capita landholdings before the introduction of elections and these advantages disappear after elections are introduced. This result is robust to a variety of robustness checks. Our study improves the existing literature by providing a before-and-after comparison to assess the impacts of political decentralization on local capture.

Keywords: Political decentralization, local capture, lineage groups

讨论稿原文下载../../../../docs/20241021095758010183.pdf