The Returns to Office in a “ Rubber Stamp ” Parliament

Are there returns to office in an authoritarian parliament? A new dataset shows that over 500 deputies to China’s National People’s Congress are CEOs of various companies. Entropy balancing is used to construct a weighted portfolio of Chinese companies that matches companies with NPC representation on relevant financial characteristics prior to the 11th Congress (2008-2012). The weighted fixed effect analysis suggests that a seat in the NPC is worth an additional 2.01 to 2.04 percentage points in returns and a 6.92 to 7.46 percentage point boost in operating profit margin in a given year. Additional evidence reveals that these rents stem primarily from the “reputation boost” of the position, and not necessarily formal policy influence. These findings confirm the intuitions of several prominent theories but suggest the need to further probe the nature of rent distribution and representation in authoritarian systems. authoritarian institutions; representation; co-optation; selectorate theory; power sharing; returns to office; China; National People’s Congress; entropy balancing †Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University Department of Political Science. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Additional financial support was provided by Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and Leitner Program in Political Economy. Thanks to Ken Scheve, Thad Dunning, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Lily Tsai, Peter Lorentzen, Jamie Horsely, Allison Carnegie, Dawn Teele, Michael Weaver, Scott Kennedy, Pierre Landry, Jeremy Wallace, Jessica Weiss, and Stephanie Balme for helpful comments at various stages in the project. Any remaining errors are my own.

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