TY  - JOUR
AU  - Martinez-Bravo,Monica
AU  - Miquel,Gerard Padró 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 Padro 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
Department of Economics
Yale University
27 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
E-Mail: nancy.qian@yale.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  -