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The prevailing argument that quasi-democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes improve governance outcomes hinges on the presumption that institutions empower non-state actors and constrain the discretionary power of ruling elites—a concept we call "institutional bindingness." However, institutions are not always binding, and the degree of institutional bindingness varies across contexts. This article examines the bindingness of village elections in China. Through the lens of land expropriation in peri-urban villages and using survey data, we find that institutional bindingness—operationalized in terms of the power structure within village leadership—strongly shapes the processes and outcomes of land expropriations and therefore the quality of village governance. Moreover, village power structure depends on political bargaining between ordinary villagers and local states. Our findings contribute to the understanding of quasi-democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes by explicitly examining how institutional bindingness affects governance outcomes and how bindingness is endogenously determined.

AbstractLegal reforms that improve the security of private property rights to land have characteristics of a public good with dispersed benefits. However, nothing ensures that the state will provide property protection as a public good. Some states provide property protection selectively to powerful groups. Others are unable to provide property protection. In this paper, we argue that whether the state provides property protection as a public good, selectively, or cannot establish private property rights depends on the following features of politics: political stability, government capacity to administer and enforce private property rights, constraints on political decision-makers, and the inclusivity of political and legal institutions. We illustrate the theory using evidence from reforms that increased opportunities to privately own land in the US from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, selective enforcement of land property rights in China, and the absence of credible legal rights to land in Afghanistan.

"Since Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, critics have argued that population growth and capitalism contribute to overuse of natural resources and degradation of the global environment. They propose coercive, state-centric solutions. This book offers an alternative view. Employing insights from New Institutional Economics, the authors argue that property rights, competitive markets, polycentric political institutions, and social institutions such as trust, patience, and individualism enable society to conserve natural resources and mitigate harms to the global environment. The authors support their argument by considering several types of commons: forests, fisheries, minerals, and the global environment. The central lesson of these empirical studies is that following a simple set of rules - definition and enforcement of property rights in response to local conditions, creating and maintaining democracy at the local level, and establishing markets to allocate resources - improves ecological and environmental sustainability. This book will appeal to scholars of natural resources, economics, political science, and public policy as well as policymakers who are interested in environmental governance and the ways markets contribute to sustainability"--