Rethinking Political Meritocracy

Officials' efforts to gain their superior's attention is the key to understand China's governance success and the challenges it faces.

Political meritocracy, which selects and promotes officials based on their work performance, is an important explanation for China's rapid development. Less attention is given to functional department leaders (tiao), whose performance is harder to measure, attribute, or compare. This Element introduces an attention-based explanation.Political meritocracy, which selects and promotes officials based on their work performance, is an important explanation for China's rapid development. While prior studies focus on territorial leaders (kuai), less attention is given to functional department leaders (tiao), whose performance is harder to measure, attribute, or compare. This Element introduces an attention-based explanation, arguing that in China's complex bureaucratic system, marked by intricate divisions of labor and information asymmetry, capturing superiors' attention is critical for official's career advancement. Through case studies and analyses of original biographical data on functional department leaders, this Element reveals: 1) Promotion likelihood correlates with officials' ability to gain superiors' attention; 2) Not all attention-seeking behaviors align with governance goals, often fostering bureaucratic issues like formalism and over-implementation. This attention-based framework tries to reconcile debates on competence versus connections in Chinese political selection and explains both the bureaucratic system's successes and its governance challenges.