How Patronage Communicates: Information Campaigns and Government Responsiveness in China

Abstract

How do social relationships among government officials shape information flows within bureaucratic hierarchies? Classic principal–agent theories emphasize information asymmetries as a source of inefficiency, yet we know far less about the actual nature of communication within bureaucracies. We argue that patron–client ties embedded within formal hierarchies play a central role in structuring internal information flows. Lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders have incentives to conduct informal information campaigns that signal diligence and competence as a way to compete for political favors. Using newly assembled data from China—including a rare corpus of internal emails between city-level patrons and county-level clients, as well as original datasets on county governments' public responses to citizen complaints—we find that client counties communicate more frequently with higher-level officials, more often highlight their diligence in addressing complaints, and more actively defend themselves against accusations. However, client and non-client counties perform similarly in how they respond publicly to citizen complaints. These findings reveal how patronage relations can increase upward information flows without impacting public-facing performance. More broadly, these results suggest that communication in non-democratic settings may serve to strengthen informal political ties.