With an equal social structure, China seems to be better prepared for a functioning democracy than other developing countries. It has stayed authoritarian because the CCP has successfully diverted the demand for democratization through tactics of economic growth, expansion of civil liberty, and...

This paper studies the impacts of village elections on the accountability of the village committee, local fiscal sharing, and state taxation in rural China using data of 48 villages for the period of 19862002. Elections are found to substantially increase the share of public expenditures in the...

Participatory Budgeting (PB) has emerged as one of the major innovations in participatory governance for local management and local democracy worldwide. With more than 3,000 experiences recorded in over forty countries, PB is gradually changing the living conditions of increasing numbers of...

This paper shows that franchise extension is not enough for commitment to redistribution and that in the absence of de facto empowerment, the threat of revolution is intact. In particular, the paper studies the relationship between a democratic reform that extends the political rights of a...