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| High-powered Incentives and Coping Strategies of Street-level Bureaucrats： Evidence from a Case of Poverty Alleviation in M County |
| Peng Yun1 Feng Meng2 Zhou Feizhou3 |
| 1.Chinese Public Administration Society， Beijing 100017； 2.Department of Sociology， Shanghai Normal University， Shanghai 200234； 3.Department of Sociology， Peking University， Beijing 100871 |
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Abstract Street-level bureaucrats often have motivations and discretions to distort policy implementation in high-powered incentive systems due to either information asymmetry or resource constraints， but our understanding of their varying coping strategies and underlying behavioral mechanisms is limited in developing countries. How to differentiate coping strategies？ What drives various coping strategies？ The case of poverty alleviation in China provides an interesting context for us to explore the nature and driving forces of coping strategies among street-level bureaucrats.A list of mandatary tasks for local governments are specified by the target-based responsibility systems， which quantitatively measure their performance and bind it with pecuniary and career incentives. By using in-depth interviewing， participant observations， and archival data in the case of M county in Gansu province of northwestern China， among the nine antipoverty performance measures， we find that grassroots cadres either honestly implement the policies or partially or wholly manipulate the systems. These findings suggest that the coping strategies of street-level bureaucrats are jointly shaped by task attributes， incentive structure， and personal cognitions， which contribute to our understanding of policy implementation at local level.
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Received: 16 April 2020
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2020, Vol. 59 
