The Coordination between Central and Local Governments and the Transition of the Vertical Political System in Contemporary China

To amend the failures of extant theory of institutional change in explaining China’s political institutional change, the general theory of institutional change synthesizes the perspectives from harmonious and conflict schools. Based on the core mechanism of social evolution paradigm, the variation-selection-heredity, it divides the process of institutional change into five stages, including concept generation, political mobilization, power struggle, rule-making and institutional stability. This theoretical framework contributes to better grasp the intrinsic motivation and dynamic process of institutional change, presenting stronger theoretical advantages than the new institutionalism theory of institutional change. However, it neglects the role of coordination between powers in promoting institutional change, and fails to explain the dynamic evolution process of China’s vertical political system after the reform and opening-up sufficiently. The practical experience of contemporary China’s vertical political system changes shows that the coordination crisis induced by the deviation of the central and local governments in objectives, interests and organizations also promotes the evolution of the system. As a result, the institutional changes could take not only the changes of the vertical power and responsibility distribution system into consideration, but also the adjustment of the coordination mechanism of the vertical power relations in a more micro-approach, which is also the major contribution of this research.