Protégé Networks and Meritocratic Political Selection under Personalist Rule

Dictators face persistent agency problems: elites often hold divergent interests, and limited information prevents effective monitoring. Consequently, dictators favor loyal but mediocre subordinates, as competent lieutenants pose greater threats, rendering meritocratic selection seemingly incompatible with personalist rule. This paper argues that this need not be the case. An important but frequently overlooked group is the dictator’s protégés, whose support is critical to the maintenance of personalist rule. Protégés have strong incentives to uphold the personalist dictatorship from which they derive material and political benefits, while simultaneously confronting intense intra-elite competition as they seek to expand their individual influence and access to resources. These dual incentives are likely to motivate them to strategically incorporate competent lower-level officials into their patronage networks, as such clients not only serve the broader objective of reinforcing regime stability but also help them generate performance-based signals in intra-elite competition. Furthermore, as protégés’ political clout expands with the deepening of personalist rule, they possess an increasing capacity to promote their clients into even more strategically important positions. Building on this theoretical insight, I empirically examine Xi Jinping’s power consolidation over the past decade. China provides an ideal testing ground because its institutionalized “one-level-down” cadre management system allows for precise identification of Xi Jinping’s protégés and their followers, while also enabling systematic comparison with his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who presided over a far less centralized leadership. The analysis shows that followers of Xi’s protégés generate stronger local economic performance when serving as prefectural party secretaries: jurisdictions under their authority record higher monthly night-time light intensity in both cities and counties, and these gains persist for at least a year after their tenure. Moreover, followers also enjoy a significantly higher likelihood of promotion under personalist rule. Whereas followers of Hu’s protégés do not exhibit any significant promotion advantage after completing their prefectural party secretary tenures, followers of Xi’s protégés attain a markedly higher—and steadily increasing—probability of being promoted to critical sub-provincial posts once their prefectural tenures conclude. The paper further tests three mechanisms implied by the theory: (1) the dictator’s protégés themselves enjoy a substantially higher likelihood of promotion under personalist rule; (2) patrons’ enhanced political clout increases their capacity to advance their clients; and (3) the dictator’s protégés have stronger incentives than non-protégés to demonstrate competence. First, evidence from the post-tenure outcomes of provincial party secretaries shows that Xi’s protégés enjoy a substantially higher likelihood of promotion, whereas no comparable advantage appears for Hu’s protégés. Second, using a stacked event-study design, the analysis shows that when a provincial party secretary is promoted, his prefectural clients experience about a one–percentage-point increase in their monthly probability of promotion to critical sub-provincial posts in most post-event months. Third, drawing on a corpus of provincial newspapers from the Xi era and leveraging a BERT-based supervised machine-learning classifier to extract both loyalty- and competence-related signals, the paper finds that Xi’s protégés increasingly engage in competence signaling, whereas non-protégés exhibit the opposite pattern by relying more heavily on demonstrating loyalty.