Institutional Ambiguity Enables Successful Centralization: Evidence From China and Vietnam

In authoritarian regimes, internal information distortion happens when lower-level bureaucrats who directly extract and process information from society are compelled by local officials to manipulate this information before reporting it to regime leaders at the top of the hierarchy. Autocrats may attempt to minimize distortion with centralization reforms, but they are unlikely to succeed if local officials maintain their monopoly of authority over local bureaucrats. Institutional ambiguity in an authoritarian administrative hierarchy may undermine this monopoly, allowing centralization reforms to mitigate information distortion. Through a paired comparison of China and Vietnam, we find that institutional ambiguity within the Chinese hierarchy—characterized by uncertainty over the establishment of skip-level reporting lines that bypass local officials to connect the central government with lower-level actors—prevented local officials from outmaneuvering Beijing’s centralization reform. In contrast, the absence of such ambiguity in Vietnam allowed information distortion to persist despite the regime instituting a similar reform.