ABSTRACT
An additional benefit of scrutinizing the theoretical application at the local level is that, by revealing the variation among many Chinese local states that are identical in their political institutions but vary greatly in economic and social arrangements, we can safely take away an important factor that often bothers the literature of cross-national comparison of a welfare state-political regime, the effect of which on public goods provision has been contested among scholars, particularly in the non-Western context (e.g. Brown and Hunter, 1999, 2004, 2005; Lake and Baum, 2001; Rudra and Haggard, 2005; Boulding and Brown, 2014). By narrowing down the focus on a particular set of political units with similar political institutions, we can reduce the data heterogeneity and be more specific about the mechanism of “global-local dynamics” that is assumed to lead to balanced welfare distribution under the constraints of globalization. In other words, if the mechanism applies well in these local states with the same political institutions,
we can then safely argue that our theory is generalizable across different political regimes.
