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Reassessing The Quality Of Government In China, Margaret Boittin, Greg Distelhorst, Francis Fukuyama Oct 2019

Reassessing The Quality Of Government In China, Margaret Boittin, Greg Distelhorst, Francis Fukuyama

Margaret Boittin

How should the quality of government be measured across disparate national contexts? This study develops a new approach using an original survey of Chinese civil servants and a comparison to the United States. We surveyed over 2,500 Chinese officials on two organizational features of their bureaucracies: meritocracy and individual autonomy. They report greater meritocracy than U.S. federal employees in almost all American agencies. China's edge is smaller in autonomy. Differences between the U.S. and China diminish, but do not disappear, after adjusting for respondent demographics. The meritocracy gap is also robust to excluding the Chinese respondents most likely to be …


Strategic Institutional Positioning: How We Have Come To Generate Environmental Law Without Congress, Donald J. Kochan Dec 2018

Strategic Institutional Positioning: How We Have Come To Generate Environmental Law Without Congress, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

When examining legislation authorizing administrative agencies to promulgate rules, we are often left asking whether Congress “delegates” away its lawmaking authority by giving agencies too much power and discretion to decide what rules should be promulgated and to determine how rich to make their content. If the agencies get broad authority, it is not too hard to understand why they would fulsomely embrace the grant to its fullest. Once agencies are let loose by broad grants of rulemaking authority and they are off to the races, we are also often left scratching our heads wondering why Congress fails to intervene …