Paths to Decentralization: Changing Territorial Dynamics of Social Policy in the People's Republic of China and the United States
People’s Republic of China (PRC). In these large, diverse polities, policy disputes
concern not just the scope of social benefits but the extent to which national versus
subnational governments should participate in decisionmaking and make fiscal
contributions to the program. Much scholarship suggests a relatively tight coupling
between regime type and social policy territoriality, namely that the autocratic
Chinese regime should support greater centralization than a liberal democracy like the
US regime. In this paper, we argue that internal tensions within each regime have
pushed both countries away from these equilibria. Since the 1970s, in the field of
social policy, intra-bureaucratic bargaining in China has given local governments
significantly more autonomy while partisan and interest group conflict in the US has
led to power sharing between multiple levels of government.