A visual story about career pressure, land markets, and collective action
Research Story
This project asks whether institutionalized promotion incentives can make authoritarian governance less stable by pushing local officials to intervene in land markets, generate distributional injustice, and trigger conflict with citizens.
Puzzle Market Design Conflict Theory
Compensation gaps among land-losing citizens show how market prices and compensation can diverge.
Residential land prices and land-sale revenues rose sharply after the land market became a major source of local government revenue.
Cross-border comparisons help compare land transactions that are geographically close but governed by different local political incentives.
Career incentives are linked to protest, and land-price intervention is one channel connecting political incentives to collective action.
Institutionalized promotion is often understood as a stabilizing force in authoritarian regimes. This paper turns that claim around: when career advancement depends on performance, local leaders may use policy instruments that strengthen their own prospects while imposing costs on citizens.
Local governments control land supply and receive large revenues from land sales. As residential land prices and revenues rise, land becomes more than a market asset: it becomes a political tool through which officials can pursue development goals and promotion-relevant performance.
The empirical design compares land transactions across city borders. Parcels near the same border face similar geography and market conditions, but they are governed by different local leaders. That makes it possible to isolate how career incentives shape land prices.
The paper links leader incentives to protest outcomes and shows that land-price intervention helps explain the relationship. The mechanism is political and distributive: citizens respond not only to land loss, but to the perceived injustice of how gains from land development are allocated.
The contribution is a sharper account of authoritarian political economy. Promotion systems may solve one governance problem by managing elites, while creating another by incentivizing policy choices that intensify conflict between local governments and citizens.