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Does better provision of public goods produce popular support in authoritarian regimes? The positive link between this type of governance and popular support is conventional wisdom in democratic polities, where elected officials seek to provide more public goods in order to be re-elected.1Leaders in authoritarian regimes also want to remain in power, but they face different incentives for achieving that goal. Because they are not disciplined by the threat of losing elections, they have less need to court popular support. Therefore, in most authoritarian regimes, politicians more typically distribute private goods - such as plum jobs and access to scarce goods and services - to their elite supporters rather than to the public at large. In the words of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his co-authors, "bad policy is good politics" for authoritarian leaders.2
Although analysing the provision of public goods is a common feature of the literature on democratic regimes, it has not received nearly as much attention in the literature on authoritarian and hybrid regimes. What little research has been done on non-democratic regimes is mostly in the context of elections: in order to ensure a convincing electoral victory, even autocrats will increase spending on public goods.3But, in one-party regimes that do not have national elections or even the semblance of political competition, such as the current regime in China, increased spending on public goods must have other explanations.
China's leaders are not following the "bad policy is good politics" strategy of political survival. While it is true that the main beneficiaries of economic development have been political insiders, the regime has also been providing greater amounts of public goods such as education, health care and poverty alleviation in recent years. The primary threat to the regime comes not from alternative groups of elites but from political discontent among the population at large. As a result, efforts to govern better are derived from the regime's recent emphasis on building a "harmonious society," which emphasizes both economic growth and political stability. The implicit bargain is that more public goods will generate more public support, which in turn produces more stability and reduces protests, and ultimately contributes to the...