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December 2, 2016

Gerard Padró i Miquel to Speak

gerard_padro photo

Gerard Padró i Miquel, Professor of Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE), is scheduled to talk at noon on Friday, December 9, at Rosenkranz Hall, Room 05. A candidate in the Political Economy joint search (Political Science and Economics), he will give a talk titled, “The Rise and Fall of Village Democracy in China: The Autocrats’s Delegation Trade-Off.”  

An abstract of his talk follows:

We propose a theory to explain why several autocratic regimes have introduced elections at the lowest levels of administration. The theory proposes a new trade-off between obtaining good performance from local officials and losing vertical means of control. We test the predictions of the model using newly collected data on the introduction of village-level elections in China. Elections cause better performance for policies in which villagers and government agree, but for policies in which they disagree, implementation moves in favour of villager’s interests. We then show that the theory can explain why elections have been effectively made irrelevant in recent years.

Gerard is also the Master of Public Administration (MPA) Programme Director at LSE, an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), an Associate of the STICERD Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme, and Co-Director of the Governance, Accountability and Political Economy Research Group at the International Growth Centre (IGC). He is interested in the political economy of developing countries and has published work on the ethnic underpinnings of dictatorships and civil war.

Event Details

Talk Title: ”The Rise and Fall of Village Democracy in China: The Autocrats’s Delegation Trade-Off”
Date: Friday, December 9, 2016
Time:12:00 pm –1:30 pm
Place: Rosenkranz Hall, 115 Prospect St, Room 05

Lunch will be provided.  Please RSVP Lani Colianna if you plan to attend.