Maos Last Revolution:A Loyalty-Competence Tradeoff
Though more competent agents can better help dictator improve economic performance, carry out political repression or survive from political crisis (i.e.external rent seeking), they are also more prone to treason or able to limit the dictators power (i.e.internal rent seeking), which therefore cause the dictator to sacrifice the competence of the agents while hiring mediocre but loyal subordinates.This study investigates this loyalty-competence tradeoff in political selection by making use of the mass turnover of senior officials in China during 1945-1982.We construct a biographical dataset of Central Committee (CC) members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), employ their percentile positions of the education distribution of their birth cohorts and the military ranks awarded in 1955 based on their historical battle achievements to measure competence, and fred that during the Cultural Revolution, the CCP leader Mao Zedong replaced the competent senior officials with mediocre.Our results remain robust when controlling for the CC members personal characteristics, party seniority, factional ties and working experiences.The main reason for such replacement is that after the establishment of New China and preliminary industrialization, more competent CC member tends to contribute more in internal rent seeking rather than external.
Loyalty-competence Tradeoff the Replacement of Senior Officials Central Committee of CCP
BAI Ying ZHOU Titi
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
国际会议
The 1st Chinese Conference on Comparative Political Economy (第一届比较政治经济学国际学术会议)
北京
英文
108-139
2013-09-08（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）