The Logic of De Facto Power and Local Education Spending: Evidence from China

Abstract

Decentralization has been embraced as a major institutional framework to promote economic development, but scholars have suggested that decentralization engenders several potentially unintended consequences for accountability, such as local elite capture, which subsequently undermines public service delivery. Existing studies have primarily evaluated these unintended consequences in democracies but not in autocracies. To fill this gap, we investigate the variations of local public service delivery in a decentralized autocracy: China. Specifically, we argue that local politicians possess two sources of de facto political power: Political connection with higher-ranking officials and the mobilization capacity of local political actors. When political connection is absent and local politicians face strong local political rivals, they are incentivized to use public spending as a patronage strategy to garner local political support in order to assure political survival. We draw evidence from an original county-level dataset in China that contains itemized education spending data.