A comparative study of provincial policy in China: The political economy of pollution control policy

摘要

This dissertation has two purposes. The first one is to determine the role of the provinces in policy process. It has often been argued that the provinces have become more and more autonomous after the reform in the late 1970's. Yet, few studies have focused on the provincial level. In this dissertation, I demonstrate the differences of pollution control policy at the provincial level and search for the causes for these differences. The second purpose of this dissertation is to challenge the assumption of political determinism in studies of Chinese policies from the perspective of pollution control policy. All too often, scholars have downplayed the impact of socioeconomic factors in Chinese policies. Although this assumption is based on a general recognition that Chinese political system is weakly institutionalized, it does not imply that socioeconomic factors are not important.;To evaluate the relative importance of political variables and socioeconomic variables, I selected some structural variables, such as 'fragmented authoritarianism,' and political leadership variables which may have impact on pollution control policy. There are two groups of socioeconomic variables examined in this dissertation. The first one is 'the modernization level variables,' while the second one is 'the modernization pace variables.' In studies of modernization, the level of modernization indicates two things: the increase of capability and demand. Therefore, I hypothesize that a more modernized province would advocate more resources to pollution control because it has more capability to deal with pollution on the one hand, and faces more demand to do that on the other. With various statistical analysis, I found that neither structural variables nor political leadership variables explain significantly the variation of pollution control policy. Contrary to the expectation of scholars, I found that the level of modernization constrains the choices for political leaders to a great extent. The implication of this research for comparative politics is that socioeconomic variables constrain policies in the same way regardless of the types of regime. Although this research explores pollution control policy at the sub-nation level, it may also be valid at the international level because the logic is the same. China and India, different types of regime with identical problems of poverty, face similar pollution issues, and their efforts are constrained by socioeconomic factors, though in different degrees.