China's leaders describe their system of rule as “consultative democracy”, whereby the public, forbidden from organizing on matters of politics, is encouraged to participate on issues of policy. In particular, citizens are routinely solicited for input on upcoming policy debates. But are...

During the most recent party congresses in China and Vietnam, two highly anticipated candidates for promotion were sidelined. In China, Bo Xilai was arrested for corruption and stripped of his party membership. In Vietnam, Nguyen Ba Thanh remained a provincial leader with little opportunity for...

Authoritarian elections have been linked to both regime longevity and implicated in regime change, raising the question as to whether or not such elections are beneficial. This paper distinguishes between the forces leading to long term decay and those hastening immediate breakdown, arguing that...

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that this theory is too broad-brush and that the empirical work testing it is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total...

Among the concerns faced by countries pondering the costs and benefits of greater economic openness to international capital flows is the worry that new and powerful external actors will exert a corrupting influence on the domestic economy. In this paper, we use a novel empirical strategy, drawn...