This study investigates why some counties receive central government infrastructure investments while others do not, focusing on the role of retired communist revolutionaries in China.
đź“Š Data and Matching
- An original county-level dataset matches biographies of 1,614 retired communist revolutionaries to the expansion of China’s state-directed high-speed railway program.
- County-level outcomes measure whether a county received central government approval for high-speed railway investment.
🔎 Quasi-experimental leverage and robustness checks
- Exploits variation in the timing of revolutionaries’ natural deaths as a natural experiment to address endogeneity.
- Results remain robust after accounting for a wide range of alternative explanations and additional sensitivity tests.
đź“Ś Key findings
- The presence of a surviving revolutionary from a county substantially increases the probability that the county receives central approval for high-speed rail investment.
- This positive association holds across multiple specifications and identification strategies.
💡 Mechanism — Bottom-up lobbying amplified by moral authority
- Additional evidence points to retired revolutionaries helping their birth counties mobilize and lobby the central government from below.
- The revolutionaries’ moral authority as regime founders appears to elevate local requests in the eyes of central policymakers, making those requests more likely to succeed.
⚖️ Why this matters
- Findings reveal a bottom-up intergovernmental dynamic in which personal ties and symbolic authority translate into concrete policy benefits, shedding light on how informal influence shapes state-directed infrastructure allocation.
