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In this concluding chapter, I argue that the authoritarian state in China can only make “somewhat credible” commitments to capital, as it cannot and will not fully restrain itself from politicizing business. Embedded in China’s political-economic model, the politicization of business undermines investor confidence owing to the unpredictability of state demands for political services, both in their occurrence and costs.
As an additional layer of firm competition, private firms – despite often excelling in efficiency and quality compared with state-owned enterprises – face inherent disadvantages in providing political services owing to their hard budget constraints and limited political capital. Consequently, the politicization of business undermines China’s long-term ability to attract private investment and further distorts its economic model, shifting it even more toward a state-led framework.
This book also offers insights into China’s prospects for sustainable development. By examining sectors key to sustainability, it reveals a critical mismatch between China’s stated goals of sustainable development and its current methods. Without embedding long-term objectives into the incentive structures for government officials, visibility projects and state–business collusion in critical sectors are likely to persist. This misalignment could hinder China’s transition from a model of growth at all costs to one centered on sustainable development.
The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s argument and findings and describes its key contributions. It then turns to discuss potential theoretical limitations that pertain to the strategic behavior by citizens and incumbents, and potential scope conditions for the theory’s ability to explain incumbency bias in presidential and legislative elections. The chapter also examines the normative implications of the book’s main findings for the state of democracy in Latin America and the developing world more broadly. The chapter closes by touching on the book’s policy implications. Taken together, these findings challenge the conventional wisdom that incumbency bias is a form of failed accountability in which clientelism insulates officeholders from electoral control, or that corruption deprives citizens of the ability to select good representatives.The book instead suggests that incumbency bias is the natural result of properly functioning electoral accountability institutions in settings where citizens have low-quality information. While no panacea, the findings suggest that enhancing the quality of democracy requires improving institutional design and citizens’ knowledge.
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