Understanding the Quality of Government in China: The Cadre Administration Hypothesis

supports analytic studies, policy relevant research, training and outreach activities to assist developing countries in the design and implementation of policies to foster growth, democracy, and the rule of law. Abstract China's remarkable development poses a problem for theories that have stressed the importance of institutions producing " good governance " and minimizing corruption. As a possible solution to this problem, the following ten arguments are presented: 1) Current research presents us with two very different concepts of governance; 2) Only one of these can serve as the basis for an operationalization of " good governance " ; 3) In this approach, labeled " Quality of Government " (QoG), it is argued that QoG should be distinguished from " quality of democracy " , implying that; 4) the definition of QoG should be confined to the execution and implementation of public policies; 5) Using a " public goods " approach to corruption, QoG can be defined and measured in a universal way using impartiality in the exercise of public power as the basic operational norm; 6) As with representative democracy, QoG can be institutionalized in very different ways; 7) Most western scholars have confused countries' specific institutional configuration of " good governance " with the basic norm for QoG which; 7) has led to dysfunctional policy suggestions for developing countries; 8) Beginning in the 1990, the public administration in China has used performance-based management as its main operational tool; 9) This specific type of public administration can be conceptualized as a cadre organization – a non-Weberian model for increasing QoG, that has been neglected both in public administration research and in the institutional theory of development; 10) The cadre organization model, which is also found in the West, solves the perennial delegation problem in public administration, which can explain why China has thrived, despite not having a Weberian rule-of-law type of administration and scoring relatively high on standard measures of corruption 2 Institutional theories of governance and the problem with China 1 The starting point for this paper is simple; On the one hand, there is now an abundance of research in economics and political science arguing for the importance of state's administrative capacity and systems of governance for countries' economic prosperity and social development all of the available measures of quality of government institutions scores quite low, yet, as is well-known, show exceptionally high economic growth and impressive improvements, …