Evidence from China shows why autocrats may introduce local elections and how this affects policy
Read "The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China" by Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Nancy Qian and Yang Yao here.
In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Nancy Qian joins us to discuss work with Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró i Miquel, and Yang Yao investigating the introduction and subsequent erosion of local elections in rural China, which they attribute to China's evolving bureaucratic capacity over time. Using new data on political outcomes spanning four decades, they show that introducing elections improved popular policies and weakened unpopular ones.