Compliance and fragmentation : who pays for public goods in China
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- When a government does not strictly enforce its policies, there will likely be non-compliers. What explains why some agencies and citizens comply with the state more than others? This dissertation explores the variation in compliance with public goods contribution targets in China. Although the Chinese regime is relatively capable of eliciting local contribution for public works projects, it rarely coerces compliance on a big scale due to concerns over political stability. Instead, it mostly relies on giving selective incentives, such as cutting funding and policy privileges for a few laggards. In this institutional context, theories of cooperation that emphasize the free-rider problem cannot explain compliance, because the temptation to free-ride on public goods is not sufficient for a subject to defect when the state may punish laggards. To understand compliance with public goods contribution targets in China, I present a theory of quasi-voluntary compliance: the subjects comply with the state to avoid the risks of losing resources from the state in the future; and the subjects will only offer as much contribution as their peers do to avoid punishment. This theory explains why both compliance and noncompliance could be contingent behaviors. It also implies that the state may encounter a problem of coordinated inaction—it cannot effectively use the threat of punishment to induce cooperation in a community where the majority of the members have reached a low-cooperation equilibrium. In addition, I argue that coordinated inaction is harder to sustain in fragmented bureaucratic systems or social communities, because the subjects in fragmented networks have more difficulties in predicting the strategies of their peers. This argument is in contrast with the "fragmented authoritarianism" model and social solidarity theories for explaining compliance in Chinese bureaucratic systems and rural villages. This dissertation offers two empirical tests of the relationship between organizational fragmentation and quasi-voluntary compliance. First, I use water infrastructure provision records to compare compliance from agencies in centralized and fragmented bureaucratic systems. Second, I use water tax records to compare compliance from rural households in single and multi-lineage villages. Empirical results show higher compliance for subjects in fragmented bureaucratic or social organizations. This study thus provides a cautionary tale regarding reforms that favor more centralized bureaucratic control or more small-scale social solidarity.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Wu, Zheng |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
| Primary advisor | Oi, Jean C. (Jean Chun) |
| Thesis advisor | Oi, Jean C. (Jean Chun) |
| Thesis advisor | Lipscy, Phillip Y |
| Thesis advisor | Tomz, Michael |
| Advisor | Lipscy, Phillip Y |
| Advisor | Tomz, Michael |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Zheng Wu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Zheng Wu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...