Zhaomin Li

This paper proposes meritocracy as a power-sharing institution in authoritarian regimes, particularly in weakly institutionalized environments. Contrary to what Enlightenment scholars believed, our evidence shows that meritocratic institutions were not uncommon in historical states and were often associated with absolute rulers. Using a formal model, we demonstrate that meritocracy benefits rulers by enabling them to co-opt high-ability agents, and it can remain credible even without third-party enforcement mechanisms. Unlike other power-sharing institutions, such as parliaments, which function more effectively under weaker rulers, meritocracy is more likely to emerge endogenously under strong rulers and remains self-reinforcing over time. We test these theoretical predictions using historical case studies and empirical analysis of a panel of 291 historical polities. The results confirm a positive association between meritocracy and autocracy. We believe that meritocracy can fill the gap in the literature to explain power-sharing in many historical absolute regimes.

The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) has significantly transformed the interaction between governments and citizens. While past studies have focused on how citizen appeals affect responses from public servants, less attention has been paid to the role of officials' attributes in shaping government responsiveness. This paper explores how political connections influence responsiveness within the Chinese court system. Using a formalized principal-agent model, we argue that connected local judges, who have better information about central authority's task priorities, tend to allocate less effort to routine tasks of lower importance. To test this hypothesis, we constructed a novel database containing biographical information of provincial chief judges in China and their online interactions with citizens from 2014 to 2020. Our empirical analysis shows that politically connected judges are less responsive in routine tasks of responding to citizens. This study offers new insights into how internal political dynamics impact the responsiveness of government institutions.