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Adaptive Informal Institutions and Endogenous Institutional Change in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Kellee S. Tsai
Kellee S. Tsai
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, [email protected]
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Abstract

Under certain circumstances, the etiology of endogenous institutional change lies in the informal coping strategies devised by local actors to evade the restrictions of formal institutions. With repetition and diffusion, these informal coping strategies may take on an institutional reality of their own. The author calls the resulting norms and practices adaptive informal institutions because they represent creative responses to formal institutional environments that actors find too constraining. Adaptive informal institutions may then motivate elites to reform the original formal institutions. This contention is illustrated by three major institutional changes that have occurred in the course of China's private sector development since the late 1970s—the legalization of private enterprise, the admission of capitalists into the Chinese Communist Party, and the amendment of the state constitution to promote the private economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , October 2006 , pp. 116 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

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