Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this paper we exploit a unique survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly selected villages describing China's recent progress in village governance reforms and its relationship to the provision of public goods in rural China between 1998 and 2004. Two sets of questions are investigated using an empirical framework based on a theoretical model in which local governments must decide to allocate fiscal resources between public goods investments and other expenditures. First, we find evidence, both in descriptive and econometric analyses, that when the village leader is elected, ceteris paribus, the provision of public goods rises (compared to the case when the leader is appointed by upper level officials). Thus, in this way it is possible to conclude that democratization, at least at the village level in rural China, appears to increase the quantity of public goods investment. Second, we seek to understand the mechanism that is driving the results. Also based on survey data, we find that when village leaders (who had been elected) are able to implement more public projects during their terms of office, they, as the incumbent, are more likely to be reelected. In this way, we argue that the link between elections and investment may be a rural China version of pork barrel politics.
The goal of our paper is to provide an empirical basis for understanding progress (or stagnation) in the evolution of China's village committee elections. To meet this goal, we pursue three specific objectives. First, we seek to identify patterns (and trends) of voting behavior and develop ways to measure participation in the voting process. Second, we analyze who is voting and who is not (and document the process by which their votes are cast). Finally, we see to understand the correlation between propensity to vote and the quality of village elections.
To meet our objectives, the rest of the paper relies on a unique set of national representative, household- and village-level data collected by one of the authors. Using the data, descriptive analysis and multivariate analysis are used to demonstrate that while voting protocol differs across villages and over time, despite progress and despite high nominal voting rates, there are still gaps in coverage of groups of individuals in rural China. Some of the largest gaps occur in the case of women and migrants and migrant women. In many cases, large shares of individuals in these groups are being systematically excluded from truly participating in the process of voting. Policy-wise, the paper concludes that China's government needs to increase its effort to promote more regular voting procedures to insure that true participation in village committee elections is more widespread and does not systematically exclude groups of individuals.
Despite successful economic reforms over the past two decades, China's health care system for the nearly one billion people that live and work in rural areas is broken. Having admitted that there is a crisis, the government is now committed to looking for solutions. In this proposal, we have two overall goals to help provide insights on part of the solution. Our first objective is to collect an updated wave of highly informative data in Year 1 to build on an existing set of data already collected by our study team (from 2004) to analyze the effects of key health policies and institutions that have emerged over the past several years, including the government's rural health insurance system, the privatization of rural clinics, and new investments into township hospitals. Our second, more forward-looking goal for Years 2 and 3 is to set up and introduce an initial experiment on incentives to study one of the most serious flaws in China's health system: the practice in which doctors both prescribe and derive significant profit from drugs. The main hypothesis to be tested is whether realigning doctors' financial incentives embedded in the current organization of China's rural health system influence: a) the way doctors treat and manage their patients; b) the time and effort doctors put into patient care; and c) patient satisfaction.
Public services provision in the developing world, including China, is crucial for rural development and poverty reduction. Although there has been much effort focused on public goods investment in China in recent years, there are still great differences among villages in the level of public goods investment. This study seeks to explain these differences by focusing on the effect of community governance on public goods provision at the village level, including investment into roads, water control and schools. During the recent past several years, village governance in rural China has undergone a series of fundamental reforms. Arguably, the advent of direct elections for village leaders and the rural Tax for Fee Reforms are two of the most important shifts in the ways that communities manage themselves. Using a nearly nationally representative sample of communities from survey data that includes information from more than 2400 villages in rural China, we find that the direct election of a villages leader leads to increased public goods investment in the village. The paper also demonstrates that the rural Tax for Fee Reforms, ceteris paribus, has a negative effect on public goods, especially on investment by the village itself.
Paul Stockton joined CISAC this fall as a senior research scholar, bringing academic and political experience in homeland security policy issues. His research and teaching focus on how U.S. institutions respond to changing threats--especially the rise of terrorism.
As the first researcher CISAC has hired who specializes in homeland security, Stockton will help build the center's research in this area, which is gaining scholarly and public interest.
"Stockton's return to CISAC," where he held a postdoctoral fellowship in 1989-1990, "adds both new depth and breadth to the Center's research on terrorism and homeland security," said Scott Sagan, CISAC director. "He has great practical experience with Congress and national security policy making and in-depth knowledge about how government, military, and private industry forces interact in the homeland security arena."
A former advisor on defense, intelligence, counter-narcotics and foreign affairs to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Stockton also studies interactions between Congress and the president in creating budgets and institutions to address security threats. He is writing an article that explores the congressional response to hurricane Katrina and examines the unresolved challenges that Katrina-scale catastrophes pose to the U.S. disaster response system. He is editing a graduate textbook, Homeland Security, to be published by Oxford in 2007. Stockton will also write a book manuscript analyzing the domestic political constraints that shape homeland security budget and policy decisions, in a work tentatively titled The Politics of Homeland Security.
Stockton came to CISAC from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he served as associate provost and directed the school's Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Besides shaping CISAC's research program in homeland security, Stockton, who has PhD in government from Harvard, is co-teaching the center's undergraduate honors program with senior fellow Stephen Stedman.
Julie Veroff, a senior in the CDDRL Honors Program, has been named a Rhodes Scholar. She is one of 32 American men and women selected each year for this prestigious award, the oldest and best known for international study, which provides for two to three years of graduate study at the University of Oxford in England. Veroff plans to begin a M.Phil. program in development studies at Oxford next fall.
Veroff has done volunteer work on behalf of women's and refugees' rights in Nicaragua, Ghana, and Zambia through a United Nations partner organization focusing on refugee empowerment. At Stanford she is majoring in international relations, and will be working closely for the rest of this academic year with her advisor, CDDRL faculty affiliate James D. Fearon, on her honors thesis project, The Impact of Elections on Peace Durability and Quality of Democracy After Civil Wars. This fall Veroff had the opportunity to interview one of CDDRL's Stanford Summer Fellows in Democracy and Development, Luhiriri Byamungu, a human rights lawyer from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The CDDRL Honors Program offers students majoring in International Relations the opportunity to conduct an independent research project focused on issues of democracy, development, and the rule of law under CDDRL faculty guidance. Such a project requires a high degree of initiative and dedication, significant amounts of time and energy, and demonstrated skills in research and writing. Honors students present a formal defense of their theses in mid-May of their senior year.
Students interested in the CDDRL Honors Program should consult with prospective honors advisers in their junior year and plan to submit their honors thesis proposal in the spring quarter of that year. Choosing courses that provide academic background in an applicant's area of inquiry and demonstrating an ability to conduct independent research are prerequisites for the program, as are a 3.5 grade-point average and strong overall academic record. Required coursework includes INTNL REL199, an honors research seminar that focuses on democracy, development, and the rule of law in developing countries.
A proposal to assess the societal and security implications of the female deficit in China, a study of the impact of higher education's rapid expansion in large developing economies, and incentives for provision of health care services for one billion people in rural China were among the new projects funded by Stanford's Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies (PFIIS) in mid-February. Planning grants for an international health and society initiative in the Indian subcontinent and psychosocial treatment for children orphaned by the tsunami in Indonesia were also awarded.
"These projects show great potential to advance human knowledge, help devise sustainable solutions, and build a better, more secure future for millions around the world," said Stanford President John Hennessy. "In launching The Stanford Challenge, we committed to marshal university resources to address some of the 21st century's great challenges in human health, international peace and security, and the environment."
The $3 million, intellectual venture capital fund was established by the Office of the President and the Stanford International Initiative in 2005 to encourage new cross-campus, interdisciplinary research and teaching among all seven schools at Stanford on three overarching global challenges: pursuing peace and security, improving governance, and advancing human well-being. The first $1 million was awarded in February 2006 to eight interdisciplinary faculty teams examining such issues as the HIV/AIDS treatment revolution in sub-Saharan Africa, why Latin America has been left behind in recent gains by developing countries, and food security and the environment.
"It's impressive to see the committed, collaborative, and innovative ways Stanford faculty are joining together in new interdisciplinary research and teaching to generate new understanding of the linkages among complex problems and train a new generation of leaders to address them effectively," said Freeman Spogli Institute Director Coit D. Blacker, chair of the International Initiative Executive Committee.
New projects qualifying for funding and their principal investigators are:
Two planning grants were also awarded, as follows:
The projects will produce new field research, conferences, research papers, books, symposia, and courses for Stanford students.
A third round of project awards will be made in February 2008. A formal request for proposals will be issued in the fall of 2007, with proposals due by December 14, 2007. Priority is given to teams of faculty who do not typically work together, represent multiple disciplines, and address issues that fall broadly within the three primary research areas of the International Initiative. Projects are to be based on collaborative research and teaching involving faculty from two or more disciplines, and where possible, from two or more of Stanford's seven schools.
For additional information, contact Catharine Kristian, ckristian@stanford.edu.
This project seeks to understand the emergence and evolution of social movements during the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. During the authoritarian years when Korea was ruled by (former) military generals, various social groups participated in the movement to restore democracy and ensure human rights. Their activism was instrumental to democratic changes that took place in the summer of 1987 and they continued to play an important role even after democratic transition.