The Impact of Village Leadership Integration on Rural Residents’ Satisfaction: Evidence from China’s “Yijiantiao” Policy Reform

How grassroots governance structures shape residents’ evaluations is central to understanding the effectiveness of rural governance reform. Effective and participatory grassroots institutions provide an important foundation for the sustainable rural development. Using two waves of panel data from the China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS), conducted in 2020 and 2022, this study applies fixed-effects models to examine how the “yijiantiao” policy, under which the village Party secretary concurrently serves as village committee chair, affects rural residents’ satisfaction with the work of their village committees, as well as its potential channels and boundary conditions. The results show that, first, the “yijiantiao” policy significantly increases residents’ satisfaction with village committee performance. This finding is robust to alternative estimation models and outcome measures, propensity score matching, accounting for concurrent policies, and excluding early-adopter villages. Second, the mechanism analysis supports collective economic development and public service provision as two potential pathways. Leadership integration increases collective net assets, sanitation staffing, and expenditure on agricultural production services, whereas its effect on road construction and maintenance expenditure is not statistically significant. Third, the positive effect is stronger in villages led by younger Party secretaries. Prior employment within the public-sector also shows some evidence of strengthening the effect, whereas differences across groups defined by education and economic elite backgrounds are not statistically significant. Fourth, the moderation analysis indicates that formal democratic participation, including residents’ assemblies, strengthens the positive effect, whereas informal authorities, such as clans, weaken it. These findings suggest that the governance benefits of leadership integration are closely related to organizational capacity and the conditions for resident participation. This study highlights the importance of assessing leadership arrangements and provides valuable references for sustainable rural development policies.