Abstract
How does politics affect the distribution of public resources in authoritarian regimes? We argue that in systems where informal patronage networks coexist with strong career incentives, aspiring politicians want to use public resources to aid the careers of their clients, but are constrained by potential sanctions from competing patrons. We test the distributive consequences of this tradeoff using data on fiscal transfers and political leadership from Chinese cities along with a new method to identify patronage ties. We find that cities with leaders connected to the incumbent provincial secretary receive about 4 to 7 percent more transfers than those without. Favoritism varies markedly with political cycles, the future value of the clients, and, most importantly, the relative power of the competing governor. Analyses of both official statistics and satellite data further show that connected cities spend more on infrastructure, partly due to the additional inflow of transfers.
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