Locking in fair weather friends: Assessing the fate of Chinese communist elite when their patrons fall from power

Abstract

A growing literature shows robust evidence that patronage by high-level politicians greatly enhanced officials’ chance of promotion in the largest one-party dictatorship in the world, China. There have been few works on whether patrons’ exits, even when they were retirements, had an impact on followers’ career prospects. This question concerns the core theoretical issue of whether factional ties are self-reinforcing mechanisms. That is, patron–client relationships were only useful for patrons if they knew that clients would suffer if they fell from power. This mechanism creates strong incentives for clients to engage in political struggle on behalf of their patrons, regardless of the patrons’ monitoring capacity. We control for a range of unobserved heterogeneity and show that patrons’ exits from the political elite had a significantly negative impact on clients’ chance of promotion and also diminished their chance of retaining their incumbent positions.