Organizing authoritarian oversight: Central inspections in China’s anticorruption enforcement

Abstract

Due to a lack of political participation and widespread preference falsification, top-down inspection through a dedicated agency is by far the most viable way to organize bureaucratic oversight in autocracies. Such an agency faces an important dilemma, however. On the one hand, if the agency does not appear to have significant discretionary power to set the scope of investigation, they risk failing to target on-going bureaucratic drift and, consequently, compromising its role as a deterrent against future abuse. On the other hand, the agency needs to establish credible commitment to the autocrat’s agenda. This incentive to align their work with the autocrat’s shifting focus becomes especially difficult to ignore under an established autocrat. We explore the anticorruption campaign during Xi Jinping’s first presidential term for insights into how the Central Inspection Teams (CIT), led by a long-term political ally of Xi, managed this dilemma in authoritarian oversight. We used topic modeling to track changes in the focus of Xi and CIT on corruption and discipline based on a novel corpus of CIT mobilization reports and speeches delivered by Xi, and assessed the pattern of alignment between them over time. Our statistical results indicate that the CIT’s scope of corruption investigation was significantly and consistently different from Xi’s own focus on party discipline at the aggregate level. At the same time, the agency remained highly sensitive to changes in the autocrat’s focus, setting the emphasis on corruption and discipline of individual inspections in close alignment with the autocrat’s changing interest. Our findings suggest that oversight agent in authoritarian regimes tread an organizational fine line between acknowledging the autocrat’s changing position and maintaining a significant measure of discretion over their oversight work.