Top-Down Accountability, Social Unrest, and Anticorruption in China

• Author: Linke Hou,Mingxing Liu,Dong Zhang
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740221100522
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Top-Down Accountability, Social Unrest,

and Anticorruption in China

Linke Hou

1

, Mingxing Liu

2

and Dong Zhang

3

Abstract

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 represen-

tative panel data of approximately 120 villages in China, we find that when anticorruption is prescribed as a salient policy goal

in the township-to-village performance evaluation, village officials are incentivized to curb corruption. We further present

evidence that the mandate for maintaining social stability propels township-level governments to prioritize the anticorruption

work in the performance evaluation of village officials given that corruption constitutes a crucial trigger for social unrest. Our

study sheds light on the understanding of performance management, bureaucratic accountability, and anticorruption policies in

authoritarian countries.

Keywords

Performance management, anticorruption, social unrest, China

Introduction

Endemic corruption not only plagues the public sector (e.g.,

Anderson & Tverdova, 2003; Liu & Mikesell, 2014, 2019;

Liu et al., 2017, 2021; Rose-Ackerman, 1999), but also has

pernicious economic and social repercussions (e.g., Mauro,

1995; Villoria et al., 2013; Zhang & Kim, 2018; Zhu et al.,

2019). Desiring clean governments and good governance,

policy makers, academics, and the general public are all

searching for effective policies to combat corruption (for a

review, see Gans-Morse et al., 2018).

A growing body of literature highlights the effectiveness

of top-down anticorruption policies—including monitoring,

audits, and investigation—initiated by higher authorities

(e.g., Avis et al., 2018; Bobonis et al., 2016; Ni & Su,

2019; Olken, 2007; Serra, 2012). Bottom-up anticorruption

approaches, with an emphasis on civil society monitoring

and citizen-led whistle-blowing, have also attracted increas-

ing attention from scholars, although there is mixed evidence

to establish the effectiveness of these approaches (e.g., Bashir

et al., 2011; Gong, 2000; Lavena, 2016; Olken, 2007; Serra,

2012; Su, 2020; Su & Ni, 2018).

Despite the improved understanding of anticorruption

strategies based on growing empirical evidence, anticorrup-

tion reforms have made very limited progress in the real

world (Jancsics, 2019). Fundamentally, political leaders

and government officials often lack incentives to combat cor-

ruption, especially in developing countries. For instance, the

scale-up of a promising anticorruption program in India had

to be shelved because it threatened the rents of local officials

and propelled them to lobby the state government for its can-

celation (Banerjee et al., 2017). While the existing scholar-

ship on anticorruption has devoted a great deal of attention

to the effectiveness of anticorruption policies, the anticorrup-

tion incentives of government officials are relatively under-

studied. What motivates local government officials to fight

corruption? If top-down monitoring is truly effective in

curbing corruption, under what circumstances do govern-

ment officials impose top-down anticorruption approach?

In this study, we attempt to answer these questions in the

context of China. China constitutes an intriguing case for

studying corruption and anticorruption in the sense that

rampant corruption puzzlingly coexists alongside a stellar

record in economic performance during the post-1978

reform era. One plausible account of this puzzle is that the

Chinese government’s anticorruption endeavors have to

some extent prevented corruption from spiraling out of

control, albeit failing to systematically reduce corruption

(Wedeman, 2012). Another explanation is that centralized

1

Center for Economic Research, Shandong University, Jinan, China

2

China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University, Beijing,

China

3

Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and

Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong

Corresponding Author:

Dong Zhang, Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of

Science and Technology, Rm. 2381, Academic Building, Clear Water Bay,

Hong Kong.

Email: dongzhang@ust.hk

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2022, Vol. 52(6) 423–438

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740221100522

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and decentralized corruption have different implications for

governance (Shleifer & Vishny, 1993). Like other East

Asian countries, corruption is relatively centralized in

China, such that the “petty”corruption of local government

officials and street-level bureaucrats has been largely con-

tained (Bardhan, 1997). In view of these insights, unraveling

the logic of anticorruption at the local level in China is crucial

for understanding both how the Chinese government’s anti-

corruption initiatives translate into front-line bureaucrats’

efforts on the ground through a fairly centralized political

system, and how the local bureaucracy actually works to

curtail “petty”corruption.

We contend that the Chinese government’s performance

management system imposes top-down accountability upon

local government officials and offers incentives for monitor-

ing and combating corruption at the local level. Performance

management serves as a critical tool for higher-level officials

to control local state agents and ensure local policy compli-

ance (e.g., Edin, 2003; Gao, 2009). In a multitasking environ-

ment of bureaucracy (Dixit, 2002; Holmstrom & Milgrom,

1991), lower-level officials are motivated to carry out poli-

cies prioritized by higher-level authorities. When anticorrup-

tion becomes a primary policy target demanded by

higher-level officials in performance evaluation schemes,

lower-level officials tend to take measures to curb corruption

to demonstrate their compliance with policies emanating

from higher-level authorities.

Local governance entities in China consist of provincial,

municipal, county, township, and village levels of adminis-

tration. In this study, we leverage three waves of a nationally

representative survey of approximately 120 villages to

explore the determinants of anticorruption incentives at the

village and township levels in China. This survey, adminis-

tered by the China Center for Agricultural Policy of the

Chinese Academy of Sciences, yields one of the few compre-

hensive data sets on the performance evaluation of Chinese

local officials at the county, township, and village levels

(e.g., Hou et al., 2018; Lu & Tao, 2017). According to this

survey, performance targets, including general targets and

veto targets, are widely used in county-to-township and

township-to-village evaluation schemes. For general

targets, political leaders from township to village levels

were asked to list their five most important policy targets

imposed in the performance evaluation system; for veto

targets, political leaders were asked to list the policy targets

that would nullify all other performance achievements if

they were not fulfilled. Using fixed-effects models, we docu-

ment that when anticorruption was included both as one of

the top-five general targets and as a veto target in

township-to-village evaluation schemes, village leaders

were more likely to take measures to curtail corruption to

fulfill political mandates from the township-level leadership.

In enforcing top-down monitoring, however, township

government officials do not act out of benevolence. The

reason why they decide to set anticorruption as a priority

lies in their concern for maintaining social stability. We

present evidence that corruption has been a crucial trigger

of social unrest in local China. When county-level officials

are concerned about social unrest, and thus set maintaining

social stability as a primary policy goal, township-level offi-

cials tend to prioritize anticorruption work to prevent mass

collective actions.

Our research makes several contributions to the existing

scholarship. First, departing from recent evidence-based

research that has documented the effectiveness of top-down

monitoring in curbing corruption (Avis et al., 2018;

Bobonis et al., 2016; Ni & Su, 2019; Olken, 2007; Serra,

2012), we shift attention to the incentives for fighting corrup-

tion and enforcing top-down monitoring strategies in local

governments. Second, to the extent that some scholars

emphasize the importance of top leadership’s political will

in combating corruption (e.g., Choi, 2009; Quah, 1994), we

advance this line of research by studying how anticorruption

initiatives at higher levels of governments translate into front-

line officials’efforts on the ground, and exploring what

drives anticorruption initiatives in the first place. Third,

while one strand of the literature devotes its attention to

bureaucrats’intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to engage in

or refrain from corruption individually (e.g., Kwon, 2014;

Perry, 1996; Zhang et al., 2019), we focus on the motivations

to implement anticorruption policies and practices. Finally,

our study enriches the literature on the effectiveness of per-

formance management (Gerrish, 2016) by showing that

even in an authoritarian state, top-down accountability pro-

vided by the performance management system can help

curb corruption at the local level to some extent.

Top-Down Accountability and Performance

Management

In the absence of free, fair, and competitiveelections, political

leaders in authoritarian states are not accountable to citizens.

Despite the absence of bottom-up accountability, we empha-

size how top-down accountability can discipline lower-level

officials’behaviors and prompt them to be accountable to

higher-level officials. Our conceptualization of top-down

accountability resonates with the definition of “bureaucratic

accountability”outlined in Romzek & Dubnick’s (1987,

p. 228) classical framework: “the expectations of public

administrators are managed through focusing attention on

the priorities of those at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy.”

In the public sector, performance management plays a crit-

ical role in enhancing top-down accountability. Performance

management emerged in the public sector in the 1970s

(Moynihan, 2008) and flourished with the advent of New

Public Management, the principal doctrines of which

include explicit standards and measures of performance as

well as output controls (Hood, 1991). One major objective

of performance management is to improve the “3Es”—

424 American Review of Public Administration 52(6)