This research focuses on the informal ways in which social groups articulate interests and monitor local officials in non-democracies. Unlike democracies, autocracies lack formal institutional mechanisms for citizen participation in the policy process. However, this does not mean, as some theorists have assumed, that these citizens lack interests or avenues of articulation. Through social groups such as business associations, environmental protection NGOs, clubs, and ethno-linguistic or lineage groups, citizens informally articulate preferences to local officials. Social groups embed and encircle members of a community, including local officials, and serve to set standards of appropriate behavior. These social groups allow access to local officials, as well as make available social mechanisms of monitoring and enforcing community preferences. While the researcher argues that in some cases these informal social groups can serve as substitutes for formal channels of interest articulation, these social institutions are not necessarily preferable to formal institutions. In fact, this research seeks to show how different types of social groups influence varied policy outcomes (i.e., different types of spending decisions), ranging from the capture of state resources by one group to the provision of high levels of public goods to the whole community. To show how the characteristics of social groups influence policy outcomes, the researcher tests a typology using a mixed methods approach consisting of time-series statistical analysis of public spending in 40 countries over 25 years, and a natural experiment. Constructing a natural experiment, using local government statistics and interviews from three different prefectures in China's Yunnan province, allows the researcher to hold formal institutional variables constant and vary the type of social group prevalent in each case to show the effect and weighting of each variable. The broader impact of this research is that it creates an empirical and theoretical starting point for scholars to understand how social networks operate in non-democracies as a substitute for formal mechanisms of citizen expression and accountability, which are essential for good governance.
