Punctuated Equilibrium and the Information Disadvantage of Authoritarianism: Evidence from the People's Republic of China

Abstract

According to the punctuated equilibrium thesis, government attention allocation alternates between long periods of stasis and dramatic spurts of disequilibrium because democratic institutions enable minority groups to obstruct change. This article presents a critical discrepancy in contemporary China, where punctuated instability is significantly more intense despite a lack of democratic institutions to empower minority obstructionism. Our empirical analysis further reveals that punctuated intensity goes even higher for Chinese regions facing fewer signs of social discontent. We attribute the intensification of punctuated dynamics to an information disadvantage arising from the lack of diverse, independent sources of information under authoritarianism. Our finding contributes to punctuated equilibrium theory by underlining the function of opposition groups not only as obstructionists but also as challengers to policy priorities. By marginalizing these challengers, authoritarian institutions confine attention to known problems, leading to serious delays in the discovery of and adjustment to emerging issues.

Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes

“…But once it happens, the policy response can be radical and extremely forceful' (Lam and Chan 2015: 552). Chan and Zhao (2016) continue this inquiry, drawing on evidence from the People's Republic of China. They find that informational restrictions are the main drivers of punctuated equilibrium, and also that there is a negative correlation between the level of punctuation across Chinese regions and the level of labour disputesa proxy for regime threat.…”

Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes

“…A robust literature has now explored PE theory with regard to budgeting, but that literature has almost exclusively been focused on advanced industrial democracies, with some attention to subnational budgets (e.g., states, municipalities, and school districts) within these nations. Here we present just the second example of detailed attention to the shape of budgetary change in nondemocratic settings, building on the work of Lam and Chan (2015) and Chan and Zhao (2016).…”

“…To date, Lam and Chan (2015) and Chan and Zhao (2016) have conducted the only tests of PET in the context of non-democracies (see also Pauw 2007 on South Africa; other tests have been in western democracies). Looking at the case of Hong Kong, Lam and Chan propose that non-democracies are characterized by less friction than democracies because the institutional design of these regimes centralizes power at the highest level of government, and yet, at the same time, the absence of these friction-including institutions also reduces external interferences to political processes.…”

“…But once it happens, the policy response can be radical and extremely forceful' (Lam and Chan 2015: 552). Chan and Zhao (2016) continue this inquiry, drawing on evidence from the People's Republic of China.…”

Truncated Decision Making and Deliberative Implementation: A Time‐Based Policy Process Model for Transitional China

“…The punctuation equilibrium model shows the change and diversity of agendas over time and pays great attention to information that appears during the periods in which significant policy changes occur (Baumgartner & Jones, ; Jones, ). The disproportionate focus on these periods involves analysis of the information’s content but not of the timing when it emerges (Baumgartner et al, ; Chan & Zhao, ; Eissler, Russell, & Jones, ; Jones & Baumgartner, ; Pump, ). The advocacy coalition framework models changes in a coalition’s policy beliefs over a long span of historical time (or policy cycle) and then seeks to explain the policy changes caused by policy‐oriented learning or by external events (Mintrom & Vergari, ; Sabatier, ).…”