The Art of Authoritarian Rule: Informal Institutions and State Capacity in China

The University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Contemporary China presents a talk on the institutions used by the Chinese government to pressure citizens.

All authoritarian regimes require some amount of compliance from the citizens they rule. Yet relying on coercion alone to elicit political obedience is impractical. How, then, do authoritarian rulers persuade citizens to obey them? Dan Mattingly argues that authoritarian states are most powerful when they can harness informal norms and group solidarity as a tool of political control. He will examine three hard cases of control in China: land requisitions, tax collection, and state family planning policies. Mattingly will show that when local communal elites, such as the leaders of lineages or clans, are included in local political institutions, the ability of the state to implement these costly and sometimes coercive policies increases dramatically. This finding challenges the conventional wisdom that communal and civic ties in China are ways for citizens to pressure the state from the bottom up. Instead, he argues, communal and social solidarity help the state to pressure citizens from the top down. China's extraordinary state capacity relies on local brokers who can use social ties and participatory institutions to persuade, cajole, and coerce their group into complying with the state.