Is What I Manage Mine? Promotion Pressure under the State-Owned Land System Distorts the Political Competition Behavior of Officials in Urban Land Allocation

The phenomenon of political interest acquisition by urban officials profoundly affects the development of cities around the world, but there is a lack of sufficient research on how political interest acquisition affects the utilization of urban resources. This study aims to extend the understanding of this issue by viewing city officials’ promotion competition as a manifestation of political interest acquisition and investigating the impact of city officials’ promotion competition on the utilization of urban land resources. We theoretically deduce the impact of city officials’ promotion competition on city fiscal pressure, which ultimately affects how cities can obtain income from land and dispose land income. To measure the promotion competition incentives, fiscal pressure, and utility of urban land revenue for empirical analysis, a series of quantified indicators are constructed correspondingly. By employing an integrated empirical approach, including generalized method of moment (GMM) regression, mediation effect, and threshold models, and samples of 251 prefecture-level cities taken between the Years 2009 and 2017, the proposed mechanism is examined. The findings indicate that the risk intensity of city officials’ promotion competition generally reduces the efficiency of cities in obtaining land transfer income and leads to an unreasonable use of land income. Additionally, moderated by a dynamic fiscal pressure, officials’ promotion competition exhibits a negative–positive–negative and negative–positive nonlinear characteristic in the impact on rationality of land revenue and expenditure, respectively. The core conclusion is that increasing incentives for political interest can systematically undermine the utility of scarce resource allocation in urban development, whereas explicit constraints on official authority help mitigate this negative effect. The empirical pieces of evidence from China enlighten two fundamental approaches for other countries to alleviate the threats of political interest competition on urban development: sustainability-oriented political incentives and explicit constraints of power or political instruments. This study also inspires urban planning professionals to identify political uncertainty and craft land-use strategies that remain sustainable and adaptive amid leadership changes.