Local compliance under campaign-style enforcement: a city-level panel analysis of affordable housing mandate in China

Abstract

Housing scholars have debated over the effectiveness of top-down political mandates to improve local affordable housing production. Whereas existing studies focussed on local fiscal and political constraints, how local compliance is shaped by vertical and horizontal dynamics of inter-governmental relationships is less known. This study investigates city government compliance with a top-down mandate of affordable housing construction during 2011–2015 in the context of the multi-tiered governmental hierarchy of China. Using a unique city-level panel dataset of the committed target of affordable housing construction, the analysis reveals substantially uneven compliance across cities and regions. Findings indicate that such variation in local goal setting can be attributed to both a divergence in local capacity of resource mobilization as well as political bargaining and competition within provinces. This research expands the scholarly knowledge of local strategic compliance with a top-down housing mandate, as well as local government behaviour in affordable housing policy from the lens of policy implementation.

Keywords:

• Affordable housing
• policy implementation
• mandate
• compliance
• China

Acknowledgement

This research received data support from the Micro-Data Center of the National Bureau of Statistics of China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, available information from news reports indicated that the average cost of housing development was roughly 4,000 yuan per square metre in Xiamen, a wealthy eastern city in Fujian Province (http://xm.cnr.cn/xwpd/zjxm/200802/t20080229_504719335.html), but less than 2,000 yuan in Guoluo, a western prefecture in Qinghai Province (http://news.cnr.cn/gnxw/gnjx/201106/t20110616_508102683_1.shtml).

2 Tibet and Xinjiang are two autonomous regions with ethnic minority concentration, where social and political stability are the top priority over other policy agendas.

3 T tests found no significant difference in the mean values of most independent variables between observations with and without numeric target data.

4 There were 1,014 valid observations for actual construction, derived from the previous-year key achievements section in the mayors’ reports, compared to a total of 1,237 valid observations for the committed construction. There were 847 cases where both committed and actual construction numbers were available.

5 We obtained the data through the Micro-Data Center of the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBSC). The results of this study do not represent the views of the NBSC.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 42071208) and the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences of China (National Social Science Fund, Grant no. 20ZDA042).

Notes on contributors

Zhilin Liu

Zhilin Liu is an associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Management, and a research fellow at the Hang Lung Center for Real Estate, Tsinghua University, China. Her main research interests are in urban planning and governance, affordable housing, rural-to-urban migrants, and sustainable urbanization.

Luyao Ma

Luyao Ma is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, China. Her main research interests are in housing policy, urban governance, and public policy analysis.

Edward G. Goetz

Edward G. Goetz is a professor in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, USA. He specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy.