Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears
to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists …

I provide a critical overview of the literature on political decentralization. After reviewing first-
and second-generation theories of federalism, I describe recent empirical studies focusing …

China's economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction.
However, China's institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer …

Despite the dominant narrative of the repression of civil society in China, Civil Society under
Authoritarianism: The China Model argues that interactions between local officials and civil …

In this article, I analyse civil society development in China using examples from Beijing to
demonstrate the causal role of local officials' ideas about these groups during the last 20 …

This essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual
treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a …

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to analyze the spread of
economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades. This article documents …

How does political decentralization affect the frequency and costliness of bribe extraction by
corrupt officials? Previous empirical studies, using subjective indexes of perceived …

Disentangling the relationship between economic development and environmental
protection has attracted much attention from public administration scholars. While …

The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public
administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical …