My superior’s appreciation, my subordinates’ promotion: experimental evidence of a promotion decision model of middle-level bureaucrats in China

Abstract

Previous scholarship on bureaucratic promotion acknowledges that both political and meritocratic criteria play important roles in deciding who is promoted among candidates. However, how the preferences of decision makers’ superiors may shape promotion decision making receives less attention. To address this gap, we propose a three-tier hierarchical structure where middle-level bureaucrats employ three criteria to determine the promotion of subordinates: appreciation from middle-level bureaucrats’ superiors, merits of lower-level candidates, and candidates’ social ties to middle-level bureaucrats. Looking at middle-level bureaucrats offers a basis for the cross-layer role of upper-tier superiors in shaping middle-level bureaucrats’ decisions for lower-level candidates’ promotions. A conjoint survey experiment among a nationwide sample of Chinese bureaucrats reveals that bureaucrats not only prefer candidates with meritocratic attributes and social ties to themselves, but also prefer candidates appreciated by upper-tier superiors. Moreover, although political concerns are important determinants of promotion choices, merit of candidates (especially client evaluation) has the greatest influence.

Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We acknowledge Wenhui Yang, Youlang Zhang, and Liang Ma for valuable feedbacks to the earlier version of this article. We thank scholars who offered feedback at the 2019 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. We also thank Zhiyuan Zhang and Mingshuai He for assistance during sending the questionnaires.

Notes

1 See reports from The Paper at: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_15565828 (accessed on June 12, 2022) and government website: http://www.mca.gov.cn/article/wh/whbq/jczqjs/202203/20220300040661.shtml (accessed on June 12, 2022).

2 For more information about public organizations and who should be counted as a public employee in China, see (Ang 2012).

3 In China, officials mostly do not serve out their full 5-year term. The average length of tenure is around 3 years for local officials or even less than 2 years (Landry, Lü, and Duan 2018; Mei 2009). Grass-roots civil servants also have opportunities to break through the restrictions of tenure and achieve rapid promotion through temporary transfer programs. Therefore, we use 1–2 year working experience as a baseline level.

4 It is a common phenomenon in observational and experimental studies that comparing the effects of various attributes as effect sizes may depend on the specific operationalization of concept. In this study, we have provided concrete, tangible, and the most commonly used operationalizations of key concepts that engage well with the political selection literature.

5 We set being a stranger as the baseline level for social ties. This scenario is a highly possible situation because China has implemented the civil servant exchange system. Through various exchange and transfer programs, officials at different levels can be sent to other regions to work in different organizations. Even for small organizations, the frequent official transfer could make other officials in the same organization unknown to the superior. For more detailed discussions on official exchange and transfer in China, see (Lee and He 2014; Zhu and Meng 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This research was sponsored by the Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71721002) and the High Level Project in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences of Tsinghua University (2021TSG08101).

Notes on contributors

Xufeng Zhu

Xufeng Zhu ([email protected]) is Professor and Dean at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China. His major research interests in China studies are the policy process, think tanks, and public governance. He is the author of seven books in English or in Chinese. His recent publications include articles in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, Public Administration, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, International Public Management Journal, and so on.

Juan Du

Juan Du ([email protected]) is Associated Professor at School of Public Administration, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. Her research focuses on policy process, policy analysis and environmental policy. Her research has been published in Public Administration, The China Quarterly, Environmental Policy and Governance, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others.