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ABSTRACT
Scholars credit policy experimentation with China’s economic reforms and authoritarian resilience. This article traces the evolution of experimentation through the prism of varying motivations, such as individual career incentives, improving governance, and symbolic and factional politics. Despite the benefits, there has been a notable reduction in experimentation under Xi Jinping, creating disincentives to innovate at the local level. Nevertheless, we do find remaining pockets of policy experimentation as a result of ineffective institutional incentives, influence of peer groups, and variations in the personalities of policymakers. However, it is unclear if this is robust enough for further economic or governance reforms.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jessica C. Teets
Jessica C. Teets is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Middlebury College, the President of the Association of Chinese Studies (ACPS), and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Political Science. Her research focuses on governance in authoritarian regimes, especially sources of change such as local policy experimentation and civil society. She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014), in addition to articles published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Governance, and the Journal of Contemporary China.
Reza Hasmath
Reza Hasmath (Ph.D., Cambridge) is a Professor in Political Science at the University of Alberta. He has previously held faculty positions at the Universities of Toronto, Melbourne and Oxford, and has worked for think-tanks, consultancies, development agencies, and NGOs in USA, Canada, Australia, UK and China. His award-winning research looks at evolving state-society relationships in authoritarian contexts.