In 2001, I conducted a village-level survey of 316 villages sampled from four provinces: Shanxi, Hebei, Jiangxi, and Fujian. With a team of ten to fifteen Chinese graduate and undergraduate students in each province, the survey took about seven weeks to administer. The selection of these provinces was based both on my network of contacts and on the objective of obtaining a sample that would be roughly representative of the general population. These four provinces varied along two important macro-level dimensions. First, coastal and inland regions differ significantly from each other in terms of economic development and liberalization. Second, north and south China vary greatly in their institutional history and social organization. Shanxi and Hebei provinces in north China are relatively flat and dry, whereas Jiangxi and Fujian provinces in south China are mountainous and humid. Lineage and religious institutions in the north are generally less formalized than in south China. Villages in the north tend to be organized as a single centralized geographical cluster rather than fragmented into numerous settlements, as they often are in the south due to the terrain. Within each pair, one province was coastal and one was inland. Between the two northern provinces, Hebei, which is closer to the coast, has industrialized and developed its infrastructure more than Shanxi has. In the southern provinces, Fujian is on the coast and known for its liberal and successful pursuit of economic and political reforms, whereas Jiangxi is a politically conservative interior province that lags behind Fujian in economic development.

Previous chapters have shown how encompassing and embedding solidary groups can provide informal institutions that increase the accountability of village officials to citizens. Informal institutions, however, may have limitations. Officials may decide not to participate in these institutions when they have other political resources. Dependence on informal institutions may also be dangerous. They may come to replace the state, rather than just reinforcing it. They may reduce incentives for the central government, local officials, and citizens to invest in strengthening formal state institutions for local public goods provision, thereby limiting the level of provision to lower than it would be under different arrangements that enable localities to take full advantage of the state's resources.

If informal institutions of accountability have potential pitfalls, what about the implementation of democratic institutions for village governance? Many see free and fair elections as at least a partial solution for unresponsive and corrupt governments. If only citizens had the power to choose their own candidates for office and vote them out of power for poor performance, then there would be accountability and better governance. It was with these hopes that the Chinese central government, faced with the deteriorating quality of rural governance, introduced a series of grassroots democratic reforms in 1988 that included elections for village officials.

Since then, much of the research on rural China has focused on these village elections – figuring out how democratic they are, what makes villages more likely to implement them, and how likely they are to extend to higher levels of government.

When the boundaries of a solidary group coincide with the boundaries of the local government's jurisdiction, and the group encompasses the entire locality, the group's collective goods become the same thing as public goods. The model of informal accountability thus posits that localities with embedding solidary groups that encompass everyone in a local government's jurisdiction are more likely to have better local governmental provision of public goods than localities without these groups, all other things being equal.

In this chapter, we look at lineage groups, which generally embed village officials in their activities but vary in scale, and whether or not they encompass a local governmental jurisdiction. By looking at a single type of solidary group, we can hold numerous group characteristics constant – lineage groups have similar principles of organization, similar kinds of collective activities, similar types of membership criteria – and see what happens when the scale of the group and its fit with political administrative boundaries vary. If the hypothesis is correct, we should expect villagewide lineages to be more likely to have a positive effect on village governmental provision of public goods. Lineage groups, however, which fragment a village into subvillage groups, should be less likely to have this kind of positive effect.