• Electoral systems & reforms

Electoral systems & reforms

This article describes variation in authoritarian institutions by investigating the puzzle of divergent patterns of inequality in China and Vietnam, both high-growth single-party regimes. China‘s income inequality has risen rapidly, Vietnam‘s has only grown moderately.

Structural and socio-cultural determinants fail to account for these divergent pathways. Existing political variables are also unhelpful. China and Vietnam are coded in exactly the same way, even in the path-breaking work on authoritarian regimes. The authors, thus, take a deeper look at political institutions in the two countries, demonstrating that profound differences between the polities directly impact distributional choices.

The study finds that:

• Vietnamese elite institutions, unlike China’s, require construction of broader coalitions of policymakers, place more constraints on executive decision making, and have more competitive selection processes. As a result, there are stronger political motivations for Vietnamese leaders to provide equalizing transfers that limit inequality growth.
• Vietnam‘s institutions empower a larger group of insiders (winning coalition) and place far more constraints on the party leadership, both through vertical checks and semi-competitive elections. As a result, Vietnamese economic policies must consider a larger cross-section of society.
• Vietnam spends a far larger portion of its revenue on transfers and has been able to engender greater equalization among provinces and individuals.

The authors say that it is still too early to tell whether the development paths in China and Vietnam will converge or diverge.However, they point to the fact that growing income inequality has already pressured the Chinese government to shift its focus from promoting all-out economic growth to solving worsening social tensions.
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