This paper investigates China’s political-selection system, and reveals that authoritarian regimes encourage rather than suppress lawsuits against their own governing institutions. Indeed, central government is found to promote administrative litigation at the local level by providing local officials with promotion incentives when they enforce legal institutions effectively. This claim is demonstrated through examination of measure of administrative lawsuits as predictors of local officials’ promotion in China. Statistical analysis of panel data on administrative lawsuits in 279 prefectures in China between 2008 and 2012 supports this argument, indicating that the probability of prefecture party secretaries’ promotion is highly correlated with the legal environment. In addition,...[ Read more ]

This paper investigates China’s political-selection system, and reveals that authoritarian regimes encourage rather than suppress lawsuits against their own governing institutions. Indeed, central government is found to promote administrative litigation at the local level by providing local officials with promotion incentives when they enforce legal institutions effectively. This claim is demonstrated through examination of measure of administrative lawsuits as predictors of local officials’ promotion in China. Statistical analysis of panel data on administrative lawsuits in 279 prefectures in China between 2008 and 2012 supports this argument, indicating that the probability of prefecture party secretaries’ promotion is highly correlated with the legal environment. In addition, empirical analysis indicates that administrative lawsuits only began to influence the promotion of local officials after 2008, when the party-state increased its emphasis on the rule of law. The local legal environment had no significant effects between 2003 and 2007. This indicates a shift in both autocrats’ attitudes toward suing the Leviathan and the criteria for cadre evaluation. Drawing on data from the 2011 Chinese General Social Survey, the findings of this thesis show that citizens in prefectures with a better legal environment place more trust in local governments, which suggests a possible explanation for the efforts made by authoritarian rulers to promote administrative litigation at the local level.