政府管制、法律软约束与农村基层民主

自 1 998年《村委会组织法》正式颁布 ,实现村一级的民主 (自治 )已经成为法律约束。但是 ,对中央政府来说 ,它需要地方基层政府来执行自己所下达的各项管制任务 ,却又不提供资金 ,这样地方基层政府有理由自行收费以弥补成本。并且由于信息不对称 ,地方基层政府收取的费用 ,可能会大大超过实施中央政府管制政策所要求的水平。如果完全实现村级民主自治 ,地方基层政府搭车收费的行为会导致很高的成本 ,这样 ,地方基层政府很有可能出于自身利益的考虑而不支持甚至抵制村级民主自治。中央政府为使地方基层政府完成管制任务 ,也可能默许地方基层政府的“反”民主行为 ,从而出现所谓的“法律软约束”问题。我们的假说也得到了实证检验的支持。

Government Regulations, Legal-Soft-Constraint and Rural Grass-roots Democracy in China

In China, since the status of the Organic Law of villagers' Committee was made permanent in 1998, each village is demanded by the law to openly elect its own head to manage its own various affairs. However, the central government assigns a lot of non-funded mandates through a lot of regulations to local level governments and must rely on the latter to implement them. So local level governments can find good excuses to under-supply grass-roots democracy and even seek their self-interests in the name of implementing the regulation tasks of the central government. Because of the problem of information asymmetry between central government and local government, the local-level governments can levy taxes & fees higher than the level that is necessary to offset the implementation costs of regulations. Moreover, in order to enforce the regulations smoothly, the central government will to some extent permit some of the non-democratic behaviors of local government. In such case there exists the phenomenon of legal-soft-constraint.