Book Review
Lily L. Tsai, Accountability without Democracy: How Solidary Groups Provide Public Goods in Rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007)
Content What accounts for the dramatic differences in governmental performance and public goods provision between Chinese villages located right next to each other? Why does one village have beautifully paved roads while another comparable one has poorly maintained and rutted roads? In “Accountability without Democracy: Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China,” Lily Tsai, an Associated Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tries to answer these questions by using what she calls the „model of informal accountability‟ and by conducting an empirical research that combines qualitative data from in-depth case studies with quantitative data from a broad statistical survey, both of which covered a variety of regions in rural China. As Tsai states, research in development studies usually argues that local governmental performance and public goods provision are correlated with economic development and income raise. However, based on the analyses from her own research in 316 villages in rural China, Tsai proves that this argument is not always correct. According to Tsai, even if there are enough resources for local governments, it is not guaranteed that these resources will be used for public good. Therefore, she argues that “something has to give local officials a sense of obligation to the public and hold them accountable for meeting their obligations (Tsai 2007, 9).” In general, there are usually two ways to monitor local officials and to make sure that they fulfill their public responsibilities. One is based on the model of bureaucratic accountability that consists of a top-down structure. In this model, higher-level officials supervise lower-level officials and make sure they are doing their job; another one is based on the model of democratic accountability, which consists of a bottom-up structure. In this model, citizens, rather than higher-level officials, become the ones that supervise local officials. However, findings from both Tsai‟s case study and survey data suggest that neither democratic institutions (such as elections) nor bureaucratic institutions (performance reviews) hold officials accountable for public goods provision in China. The main problem of this is that both democratic and bureaucratic accountability lack incentives for local officials to perform well in public goods provision. As Tsai argues, since officials receive little rewards (both financial and moral) for their good performances, village officials are less likely to comply with demands from both higher-level officials and citizens. Moreover, state policies of decentralization over the last two decades have further decreased higher-level officials‟ responsibility in monitoring villages officials. Under these conditions, Tsai finds it unsurprising that the provision of local public goods and services has been and will remain a major problem in rural China. Consequently, Tsai suggests since these formal institutions of democratic and bureaucratic accountability do not seem to have a positive impact on public goods provision, that something else must explain why some villages are actually doing well in organizing and funding public goods.
According to Tsai, the key answer lies in the model of what she calls “informal accountability”. The theory behind this model is that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials may still have a strong incentive to provide public goods when they are subject to moral obligations and ethical standards (or what Tsai calls informal institutions) set by the so called “solidary groups”. By prescribing the ways in which people should act in order to maintain and improve their moral standing, solidary groups such as temple, churches, and lineages enable themselves to offer moral authority and respect as incentive for local officials to perform well. For example if local official perform well by building roads and providing clean drinking water, they are likely to gain more leverage in the community. But if local officials involved in these solidary groups fail to comply with the shared moral obligations, they are likely to suffer from social sanctions. However, in order to provide informal institutions that enable citizens to hold local officials accountable for public goods provision, solidary groups must have particular structural characteristic. In Tsai‟s words, solidary groups must be encompassing, which means open to everyone under the local government‟s jurisdiction. Besides, solidary groups must also be embedding, which means that they incorporate local officials into the group as members. Consequently, Tsai makes her hypothesis that the more a solidary group encompasses all the citizens in a particular governmental jurisdiction and the more that a solidary group embeds local officials in its activities, the more effective it is at enabling citizens to hold local officials accountable for public goods provision. In order to evaluate the plausibility of this hypothesis, Tsai researches two types of solidary groups in rural China: village temple and village churches. If the hypothesis is correct, Tsai suggests that we should expect village temples which are both encompassing and embedding to be more likely to have a positive effect on village governmental provision of public goods than village churches which are encompassing, but not embedding. Eventually, Tsai‟s assumption turns out to be correct based on the results of her statistical analysis of the 2000 village survey data. To end her discussion on informal accountability, Tsai questions whether the presence of solidary groups will work in the long run. Results from her 2000 village survey also indicate that strong community solidary institutions may make it difficult for the formal democratic institutions to develop. As Tsai concludes “when village officials need input from villagers, or when villagers want village officials to do something for them, both go to the community council. Neither village officials nor villagers have much reason to strengthen the formal institutions as long as existing informal institutions work perfectly well.” Structure The structure of this book is really clear and thoughtful. Tsai starts her book by telling the viewers about her journey to the neighboring villages of High Mountain and Li Settlement in Jiangxi province where she was about to investigate the performance of local governments in less developed areas. There, Tsai found herself confronted with vast differences in villages with the same level of economic, geographic, and political conditions. For example, whereas the main roads in Li Settlement were nicely paved, High Mountain‟s main roads were dirty and badly maintained. Consequently, Tsai started to ask why governmental performance and public goods provision between
villages located right next to each other are so different in rural China. This straightforward question eventually formed the main research question of her book. In the following, Tsai first assessed how dramatic economic and political reforms and decentralization programs had affected local governance and public goods provision over the last two decades in chapter 2 and 3. In these two chapters, Tsai also outlined the basic institutional arrangements for the provision of local public goods, formulated specific strategies for assessing village governmental public goods provision and presented previously unavailable statistics on village public goods provision gathered in 2001 through an original survey of 316 villages in four provinces. In the following three chapters, Tsai extensively explained the immense variation on how well local governments provide public goods and services based on the model of informal accountability. In chapter 4, Tsai first elaborated her model of informal accountability and then used examples drawn from rural China to illustrate how the model‟s mechanism works in practice. In chapter 5 and 6, Tsai examined the plausibility of the model by using a powerful combination of quantitative survey data and qualitative in-depth case studies to study the link between the performance of local governments and the social institutions in their communities. Finally in the last two chapters of the book, Tsai turned her focus on how formal institutions had affected the performance of local governments in providing public goods and services. In chapter 7, Tsai examined whether the assumption that democratization is good for governmental accountability applies for China. In chapter 8, Tsai then evaluated whether formal Party and bureaucratic mechanisms have had any impact on village governmental public goods provision. Methodology: The methodology used in this book by Tsai is highly elaborated and has required a great deal of effort and laborious work. Since official Chinese statistics have never included data on the provision of public services at a level as low as villages, Tsai therefore needs to design an original village survey to collect previously unavailable data on village-level provision of public that allows her to make generalizations about village governance and public goods provision for a broad range of villages. Eventually in 2011, Tsai together with a group of special trained Chinese graduate and undergraduate students conducted a survey in 316 villages sampled from Shanxi, Hebei, Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, where she also made qualitative observations in a small number of villages personally. The rationale of selecting these four provinces explained by Tsai is well considered. Since these Shanxi, Hebei, Jiangxi and Fujian reflect important regional differences between north and south China and economic differences between coastal and interior provinces, she will be able to tests her hypotheses and eliminates alternative explanations for variation in village public goods provision like economic development levels, the implementation of democratic and bureaucratic governance mechanisms. Furthermore, the survey looked at objective and subjective indicators of the quality of village public goods such as roads, schools, and drinking water; funding sources for village public goods; village public finance; personal characteristics of
village officials; township-village relations; village democratic institutions; and community social institutions. To sum up, Tsai‟s research design is highly complex and works perfectly in supporting her final conclusion. Moreover, both her qualitative and quantitative data can make great contributed to researches that specialize in governmental performance and provision of public goods. Critical Evaluation Tsai is very careful and thorough about the content throughout the book. Every time as she makes an argument, she is very precise in explaining what the argument is, why the argument matters, and how the argument is constructed. In order make her argumentation more convincing, Tsai uses multiple case studies and data from her survey in 316 villages in China to support her explanations. Tsai also outlined some important background information such as decentralization that took place in the last two decades and the basic institutional arrangements for the provision of local public goods in China, which are very helpful for readers who are not familiar with how provision of local public goods works in China. The usage of language in this book is clear and to the point, although from time to time Tsai does use some overly long sentences, which makes more difficult to read and hard to understand. The theoretical angle makes sense and is connected very well to the main analysis. The analytical parts of this book include abundant examples, and make use of both quantitative and qualitative methods. All in all, these very good elements are tied together in a very convincing conclusion. The only shortcoming which I can find in this book is that Tsai does not explicitly explain about the shared values within the solidary groups. Is it religion or sense of belonging that makes individuals want to join a certain solidary group, or is it because of financial or material benefits. Since members of solidary groups are linked together because they believe in the same moral obligations and ethical standards, it is important for the readers to know what these shared values exactly are and who holds the power to set up these shared values.
