Elections, village leadership, and institutional change in rural China

A formidable task challenging many developing countries is to build a committed and effective local leadership to implement state policies while maintaining legitimacy and stability. Elections have been widely adopted as a solution to help governments reconstruct local order and elicit compliance of both local leaders and citizens. However, the case of village elections in Rural China shows that the electoral reform is confronted with resistance not only from local leaders but also from the majority of rural residents.; To explain the puzzle, I differentiate the purposes and strategies of the state from those of its agents and focus on how local leaders strategically react to new policies under the constraints of institutional settings. Drawing on data from fieldwork and various secondary sources, I look at two sets of problems that are pertinent to grassroots governance. The first is the principal-agent problem concerning local leaders. The second is collective action problem facing individual peasants. In specific, I examine how village leaders react to elections and maintain their control with three measures. One is the coercion provided by higher-level governments. Other two are compliance measures involving either material distribution or social networks mainly associated with lineages.; I argue that current institutional constraints prevent electoral reforms from empowering the majority of peasants but may rather deepen the problems that have plagued rural control in China. More specifically, ongoing political and economic changes in China in the past two decades have driven the rural society into fragmentation while giving local officials greater autonomy to resist both state supervision and popular pressure. As a result, social disintegration and agent autonomy jointly prevent elections from solving the problems facing the state and rural society.