What motivates front-line officials to curtail corruption? We contend that performance management can reinforce top-down accountability in authoritarian governments and help contain corruption at the local level. Drawing on a nationally representative panel data of approximately 120 villages in...

Bureaucrat-assisted contention in China is a type of collective action in which native-born officials help socioeconomic elites launch or sustain popular action against outsider party secretaries by leaking information and sabotaging repression. Bureaucrats who assist local influentials are...

We develop a theoretical model of how factional affiliation and local accountability can shape the policy choices of local officials who are concerned about political survivals, and subsequently affect the long-term local development. We provide empirical evidence in support of the theoretical...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the role of factional competition and local accountability in explaining the enormous but puzzling county-level variations in development performance in Fujian province of China. When the Communist armies took over Fujian from the...

We develop a theoretical model of how factional affiliation and local accountability can shape the policy choices of local officials who are concerned about political survivals, and subsequently affect the long-term local development. We provide empirical evidence in support of the theoretical...

We develop a theoretical model of how factional affiliation and local accountability can shape the policy choices of local officials who are concerned about political survivals, and subsequently affect the long-term local development. We provide empirical evidence in support of the theoretical...