Exploring China's Audience Costs: an Institutionalist Perspective
Exploring China's Audience Costs: An Institutionalist Perspective ∗ Hans H. Tung y This Version: October, 2011 Abstract The recent burgeoning literature of the political economy of dictatorships (Wintrobe, 1998; Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006; Gandhi, 2008 ) have made inroads into cracking open the black box of economic policymaking in autocracies, and bringing more insights to the study of non-democratic regimes that used to be dominated by the old totalitarianism paradigm. (Arendt, 1951; Friedrich and Brzezinski, 1965) In the field of international political economy, researchers also start debunking the age-old myth that autocratic leaders are not held accountable domestically. (Weeks, 2008) Along this line of thought, this paper tries to flesh out the argument of autocratic audience costs in the context of a dictatorship, China, that is not only large in size, but also plays a dominant role in all aspects of international political economy. The paper offers an analysis of the political dynamics within the Central Committee of China's Communist Party. It identifies, on the one hand, the key mechanism for the Chinese leadership to be held accountable to its constituent within the Party, and that for it to solicit policy coordination among political elite on the other. Specifying these parameters and their relationship in the model allows us to understand the audience costs the Chinese leadership has to face in the context inter- national policy cooperation. More critically, as far as global governance is concerned, this analysis also makes it possible to assess how credible China's promises to the international community are.
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