Longitudinal Power Game:the Research Of "Collusion"between Local Governments

Agency perspective of this paper, is to follow the "economic man" hypothesis as the core of neoclassical economics paradigm, in which the theoretical horizon, the Principal and the Agent are "economic man", whose behavior goal is to achieve their own utility maximized.Principal income depends directly on the level of the Agent’s effort; and the earnings of the Agent is the principal’s payment of reward. Therefore, the interests of the Principal and the Agent are inconsistent with each other, and sometimes even conflict.Because of interest conflicts, in the principal-agent relationship, the Agent shall often use the powers of resource decision given by the Principal to seek their own interests, which have produced variated agent behaviors which are inconsistent with the principal expected.Since the reform and opening up, the reform of financial system has changed the original relationship between the government, local governments increasingly involved in the competition including preferential policies, programs and resources and so on. In the overall pressure environment, the grassroots government self-interesting is more and more prominent, and its action logic there has undergone a fundamental change. This leads to policies appeared a variety of flexible, distortion in the implementation process,so that policies deviate from the established goals.When the local government, especially local governments facing with quantification task decomposition method and the materialization of the evaluation system as the main characteristics of the pressure type of political system,limited by resource and local context, actively or passively take some"alternative" or "collusion" means to accomplish the tasks from their superiors,in order to cope with the target assessment system.In this paper,from the principal-agent perspective,we regard the community correction work in grass-roots government in Hubei province as the breakthrough point,then discuss the collusion phenomenon widespread in the bureaucracy.Trying to answer these two following questions:"What is the basis of collusion?", "What is the trigger power of the collusion?".According to the article,all levels of government organizations involved in the aspects of negotiation skills,time limits and information status,these are the basic elements of collusion;The collusion between the grass-roots governments has a further development affected by the binding and incentive power.The paper further describes two counties’ community correction work in Hubei Province,to show us the actual dynamic operation of collusion in the bureaucratic administrative system.X county through the collusion included all levels of government organizations and staffs,to avoid the identification of dereliction of duty or malfeasance,and "save the day",avoided the punishment caused by the correction object’s recrime.The event that Y city greet the inspection,is revealed to us that how all levels of local government organizations cooperate with each other to gain more resources and approvals for a priority for development in the same early period of scarce resources.These two cases appear to be very different,but precisely in line with the premise of collusion theory "economic man" hypothesis. In the wave of rational administrative system reform, local government has a independent of the central government’s localism rational act logic.Avoiding disadvantages is its main lines of actions,but also the starting point of the collusion.Collusions between the grass-roots government not only can build up a safety net within the administrative system,buffer and weaken the system pressure and punishment, but also can be done by mutual contact within regions and departments at all levels government organization, strive for more resources and preferential treatment, realize the goal of promoting local governance.In conclusion, both as an insurance mechanism or as a kind of mutually beneficial mechanism,collusion has become a rational and strategic choice for grass-roots government at present.