The anti-corruption campaign launched by General Secretary Xi Jinping has been one of the most far-reaching bureaucratic overhauls in modern Chinese history. How has Xi's crackdown on corruption shaped bureaucratic selection at the sub-provincial level? In this paper, we find that the purge has influenced how local ties are weighed in the appointment of prefecture city leaders. While it is common for provincial Party chiefs to appoint locally embedded officials to govern localities without high-profile corruption cases, they tend to appoint outside officials without local experience and connections to manage cities whose ex-leaders have recently been prosecuted for corruption. We argue that the provincial leaders’ objective of installing non-local officials is to exert hierarchical control and oversight in localities affected by corruption. Using an original dataset of all Party secretaries from China's 287 prefecture-level cities between 2013 and 2020, we find a significant divergence in the local embeddedness of officials who are appointed to replace corrupt ex-leaders and the embeddedness of those who fill the vacancies of transferred or retired predecessors. Our study sheds light on how Xi's anti-corruption campaign has reshaped the central–local relations and the logic of political control in China.

We conceptualize broad purges, which extend far below top powerholders in authoritarian regimes and operate according to a logic fundamentally different from coup-proofing purges that target rivals to the supreme leader. Broad purges induce risk reduction in decision making because they grossly exacerbate uncertainty and raise the likelihood and cost of political error. Empirically, we analyze political appointment decisions before and during a massive corruption crackdown in China. We estimate purge impact on appointments of prefectural Communist Party secretaries during 2013–17. To signal to Beijing that they are not building factions, party bosses of these officials can be expected to reduce risk by biasing appointments against their own clients, with variation in bias reflecting geographic heterogeneity in purge intensity. We find a large effect of purge intensity on anti-client bias during this broad purge but not in previous smaller-scale anticorruption crackdowns. This study contributes to knowledge about purges under authoritarianism.

How can one assess which countries select more experienced leaders for the highest office? There is wide variation in prior career paths of national leaders within, and even more so between, regime types. It is therefore challenging to obtain a truly comparative measure of political experience; empirical studies have to rely on proxies instead. This article proposes PolEx, a measure of political experience that abstracts away from the details of career paths and generalizes based on the duration, quality and breadth of an individual's experience in politics. The analysis draws on a novel data set of around 2,000 leaders from 1950 to 2017 and uses a Bayesian latent variable model to estimate PolEx. The article illustrates how the new measure can be used comparatively to assess whether democracies select more experienced leaders. The authors find that while on average they do, the difference with non-democracies has declined dramatically since the early 2000s. Future research may leverage PolEx to investigate the role of prior political experience in, for example, policy making and crisis management.

Fighting corruption is often seen as a crucial step toward building better institutions, but how it affects political selection remains less well understood. This article argues that in systems where corruption functions as an informal incentive for government to attract talent, anticorruption initiatives that curb rent-seeking opportunities may unintentionally weaken both the quality and the representativeness of the bureaucracy. The authors test this argument in China using an original nationwide survey of government officials and an identification strategy that exploits exogenous variations in enforcement levels created by the recent anticorruption campaign. The study finds that intensified enforcement has generated two potentially negative selection effects: a deterrence effect that lowers the average ability of newly recruited bureaucrats, and a compositional effect that discourages the entry of lower-class individuals in favor of those who are affluent and well connected. These findings highlight important hidden human capital costs of corruption elimination in developing countries.

Whether local officials in China are promoted on a meritocratic basis has been the subject of long-standing debate. Merit is commonly gauged by a leader's ability to deliver local GDP growth. Although some find economic performance to be a strong predictor of the career success of local leaders, we argue that the existing measure, which focuses on the promotion outcome of a single career step, is problematic because the career success of individual local leaders is seldom determined by a single promotion, or the lack thereof. We propose an alternative measure that is more suitable for China's political context: the length of time until promotion. Analysing the time it takes to gain promotion for four types of local leaders, we find that good economic performance is associated with a shorter time until promotion. However, the cumulative time-reducing effect of economic performance is far from significant, as it is generally insufficient to help local leaders overcome the age ceiling for promotion.

Although the advantage that incumbents may have over challengers has been extensively studied, less is known about how incumbency advantage is affected by the adoption of voluntary voting. In this paper, I study incumbency advantage in Chile, a country that adopted voluntary voting in 2012. I find that incumbency advantage substantively decreases with voluntary voting. The primary mechanism explaining such reduction was the entry of high-quality challengers, who invested their campaign resources much more efficiently compared to office-holders. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature on electoral accountability by identifying how sensible is incumbency advantage to voluntary voting and the entry of high-quality challengers. Indeed, as incumbency advantage decreases when capable challengers compete for office, it suggests that “scaring-off” skilled candidates is one of the drivers of such advantage.

This study addresses the question of why so many of the world's legislators are lawyers or law graduates. Drawing from previous studies on lawyer-legislators and electoral systems, it develops the argument that ‘first-pass-the-post’ single-member district electoral systems presume a principal-agent logic of representation and are therefore conducive to political parties selecting representatives with either occupational experience or educational training in the field of law. By contrast, proportional representation (PR) elections presume a microcosm model of representation incentivizing parties to select candidates representing diverse demographic and occupational backgrounds. This conjecture is tested by examining legislator backgrounds in three large parliaments with mixed electoral systems: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. As expected, single-member plurality elections are linked to a greater share of lawyers and law graduates in parliaments compared to those elected via PR even after controlling for several alternative explanations.