Book Project

Credit for Compliance: How Institutional Layering Ensures Compliance in China

My book project, Credit for Compliance: How Institutional Layering Ensures Compliance in China, explores how authoritarian regimes enforce laws while maintaining political control. All regimes seek to secure compliance with laws, regulate markets, and deter rule-violating behavior. This challenge, however, is particularly pronounced for autocrats, who are wary of empowering judicial institutions that promote compliance in democracies but threaten centralized power in autocracies. So how can autocracies enforce laws without strengthening potentially dangerous institutions? My research on China’s social credit system reveals a strategy I term institutional layering — the creation of additional enforcement mechanisms outside of judicial institutions.

Whereas existing accounts depict the social credit system as a technologically advanced arm of state surveillance, my fieldwork reveals a more nuanced reality. Rather than serving primarily as a tool of political or social control, the social credit system is better understood as an institutional innovation aimed at strengthening weak enforcement of laws and regulations. Drawing on more than 70,000 local records of punishments under the social credit system, I find that firms — not individuals — are the main targets of the social credit system. Importantly, these firms are punished for violating existing laws and regulations. A key question arising from these findings is whether institutional layering can indeed enhance law enforcement. Taking advantage of the social credit system’s pilot programs and new panel data on rule of law outcomes in Chinese cities, I use a difference-in-differences design to show that cities with local social credit systems do see an improvement in the enforcement of law compared to cities without them.

Overall, this book project employs a range of data sources and methods to shed light on how autocratic governments achieve governance goals without conceding political power and the efficacy of such strategies.