Government Regulations, Legal-Soft-Constraint and Rural Grassroots Democracy in China
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In China, since the status of the Organic Law of villagers' Committee was made permanent in 1998, each village is demanded by the law to openly elect its own head to manage its own various affairs. However, the central government assigns a lot of non-funded mandates through a lot of regulations to local level governments and must rely on the latter to implement them. So local level governments can find good excuses to under-supply grass-roots democracy and even seek their self-interests in the name of implementing the regulation tasks of the central government. Because of the problem of information asymmetry between central government and local government, the local-level governments can levy taxes fees higher than the level that is necessary to offset the implementation costs of regulations. Moreover, in order to enforce the regulations smoothly, the central government will to some extent permit some of the non-democratic behaviors of local government. In such case there exists the phenomenon of legal-soft-constraint.
JOUR
Zhang, Qi
Liu, Mingxing
Shan, Wei
2006
Economic Research Journal
1339