310 Accountability through Public Opinion
rituals of respect for shared ancestors. These collective gatherings help publicize who is deserving of moral standing in the community. When the boundaries of a solidary group overlap with the administrative boundaries of the local government, embedded officials have a strong social obligation to contribute to the good of the group. Because in this case the group and the public are the same, officials in localities with encompassing and embedding solidary groups can earn moral standing for providing public goods (and suffer severe social sanctions for not doing so). Officials in localities with encompassing and embedding solidary groups thus have an extra incentive to provide public goods and services to their jurisdiction.
Research and Data To study this issue, I conducted 10 months of in-depth case study research in seven Chinese provinces and surveyed 316 villages randomly sampled from eight counties in four provinces—Shanxi, Hebei, Jiangxi, and Fujian. These provinces were chosen to reflect differences in levels of economic development as well as regional differences between north and south China in terrain, institutional history, and social organization. Contemporary rural China provides an ideal setting to examine the factors that affect the quality of local governance because of the tremendous variation in the performance of village governments.2 As in many countries, the Chinese state has decentralized primary responsibility for the provision of basic public goods and services to local governments. During the period of this study (1999–2002), village government officials in China were expected to fund and organize the construction of all public projects within the village primarily through resources available within the village (Wong 1997), although this has changed in recent years.
The Importance of Solidary Groups To illustrate how encompassing and embedding solidary groups can give local officials incentives to provide public goods and services, this section draws on data from in-depth case studies.3 When solidary groups are both encompassing and embedding, officials who provide public services to the local administrative unit (such as a ward, a town, or a village) are also fulfilling collective obligations to the solidary group. Complying with group norms of collective responsibility enables them to acquire moral standing among all their constituents because, in this case, local administrative boundaries coincide with social boundaries. Solidary Groups in Rural China Village temples: The first type of encompassing and embedding solidary group in the Chinese context is the village temple. For example, in West Gate, a village