Political attention and local development: evidence from provincial leaders’ inspection tours in China

Official inspection tours represent a key mechanism of political attention allocation in China. Using manually coded data on provincial Party secretaries’ and governors’ tours across 271 prefecture-level cities from 2002 to 2023, this study examines how such attention shapes local development outcomes. Combining two-way fixed effects estimation and instrumental variable strategies, we find that provincial Party secretaries’ tours significantly improve local economic performance in the following year, while governors’ tours generate no comparable effect. Mechanism analysis drawing on organisational reputation theory reveals that inspection tours enhance local governments’ developmental support and fiscal resource allocation, and increase their attractiveness to both external market actors and higher-level government authorities. These findings advance understanding of how institutionalised political attention reshapes local government behaviour and centre–local relations in hierarchical systems.