Improving the performance of the College Graduate Village Officials Program through Increased Citizen Participation

The Chinese government introduced in 2006 the CGVO (Selecting College Graduates to Work as Village Officials) program that will have placed, by the end of 2015, college graduates in 400,000 rural villages as assistants to the elected village chairperson or to the appointed village party secretary. We plan to collaborate with the Social Policy Research Center in running a field experiment to improve the impact of this program on the quality of governance and on villager participation to governance. The pilot phase will consist in conducting case studies and extending the analysis of the rollout of the program to design randomized encouragements at the level of the CGVO, the village authorities, and the villagers. The RCT will be piloted before submission of a full proposal.