TY - JOUR AU - Martinez-Bravo,Monica AU - Miquel,Gerard PadrĂ³ i AU - Qian,Nancy AU - Yao,Yang TI - Do Local Elections in Non-Democracies Increase Accountability? Evidence from Rural China JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16948 PY - 2011 Y2 - April 2011 DO - 10.3386/w16948 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16948 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16948.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Monica Martinez-Bravo CEMFI Casado del Alisal, 5 28014 Madrid, Spain E-Mail: mmb@cemfi.es Gerard PadrĂ³ I Miquel STICERD London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE UNITED KINGDOM Tel: (44) (0) 2078523554 E-Mail: g.padro@lse.ac.uk Nancy Qian MEDS Kellogg SOM Northwestern University 2001 Sheridan Rd. Evanston, Il 60208 E-Mail: nancy.qian@kellogg.northwestern.edu Yang Yao China Center for Economic Research Peking University Peking, China E-Mail: yyao@ccer.pku.edu.cn AB - We use unique survey data to study whether the introduction of local elections in China made local leaders more accountable towards local constituents. We develop a simple model to predict the effects on different policies of increasing local leader accountability, taking into account that there is an autocratic upper government. We exploit variation in the timing of the top-down introduction of elections across villages to estimate the causal effects of elections and find that elections affected policy outcomes in a way that is consistent with the predicted effects of increased local leader accountability. ER -