Performance measurement (PM) has been widely used in China's public sector to enhance performance and ensure accountability. Like in other countries, PM in China is an arena of political management and manipulation by which political priorities are articulated and political loyalty and responsiveness are sought. This paper develops a regime-centered analytical framework to understand the political nature of China's PM. It identifies major political structures that influence the adoption and functioning of PM in China, including the unified political and administrative system, the Chinese developmental state and its performance legitimacy strategy, the unitary but decentralized intergovernmental systems, and the bureaucratic culture and informal rules. Despite their constraining effects, these structural attributes of the Chinese political system fundamentally account for the rise and popularity of PM in China.

The billions of dollars in assets seized by law enforcement each year represent a crucial source of revenue for these organizations, but also raise important constitutional questions and can create significant tensions within the jurisdictions they administer. Research on asset forfeiture to date has focused heavily on municipal police, largely neglecting forfeiture activities by sheriffs. Thus, it has missed an important opportunity to build theory about the differences between appointed and elected administrators and neglected an important source of institutional variation that may help to explain this particular administrative activity. To develop expectations about the relative levels of asset forfeiture and the response to intergovernmental incentives related to forfeiture, we draw on and extend scholarship comparing the behavior of elected versus appointed administrators in other settings. We test those expectations in analyses of more than 1,200 sheriff’s offices and over 2,200 municipal police departments between 1993 and 2007. Results suggest that sheriffs receive less forfeiture revenue than municipal police and are less responsive to state-level policies that change the financial rewards of asset forfeiture for agencies. These results hold whether we examine forfeitures made through the federal Equitable Sharing Program, where civil and criminal forfeiture cases can be distinguished, or jurisdictional level data on forfeiture, where civil and criminal forfeitures are combined. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both the research on asset forfeiture and on elected versus appointed public administrators more generally.

High-profile fatal police shootings of persons of color in recent years have led some to propose changes in the ways that police officers are trained to reduce violence in interactions between officers and citizens. This article explores the impact of a non-stress-oriented training model that some police academies have adopted as an alternative to traditional militaristic training models. We integrate multiple theoretical perspectives to develop the expectation that training interventions will have a significant impact on the nature of police/citizen interactions only when turnover of officers is sufficiently high. Results from analyses of 133 middle- to large-sized municipal police departments in 2013 suggest that non-stress training is significantly associated with reductions in use of deadly force by officers in those departments where recruits trained under such regimes make up a larger portion of the force. We do not find a significant direct or moderated effect on the number of police injured in confrontations with citizens or in the prevalence of discretionary arrests.

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Multi-Level Governance engages players from multiple levels of governments and multiple sectors for better governance results. This paper argues that private actors may take a collaborative governance approach to facilitate intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Specifically, the rise of private sector economy in China has engendered interests and opportunities for resourceful private actors to link fragmented intergovernmental policy system. Using China's “Internet + ” national strategy as a case, the paper finds that internet firms, by adopting collaborative strategies like mediating, brokering, leveraging, and coordinating, contributed significantly to a concerted and swift process of intergovernmental policy making and implementation. Individual, industrial, institutional, and global factors together induced such unusual private activeness. The paper offers evidence of China's Multi-Level Governance practices and identifies an organic linkage in the formation and functioning of Multi-Level Governance.