Accountability in One-Party Government: Rethinking the Success of Chinese Economic Reform

This paper develops a new argument for the Chinese Communist Party's success in implementing the post-Mao economic reform. We build a three-player political agency model, showing that the credibility of the threats of deposition by the selectorate and of revolts by citizens are both crucial factors in determining policy outcomes in the authoritarian political system. As the effective size of the selectorate and the cost of revolution vary dramatically across time, our results explain why different types of economic policy arise in different periods in China.