New Leader, New Policy? Bureaucratic Turnover and Policy Stability in China

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between bureaucratic turnover and policy stability in China, arguing that the effect of promotion competition on policy choice is not static but has undergone a fundamental inversion. While the existing literature suggests competition incentivized policy innovation in the pre‐2012 era, we theorize that the logic has been inverted. Drawing on a dataset of 267 prefecture‐level cities from 2005 to 2015, we first confirm that leadership turnover significantly reduces policy stability. More importantly, our structural break analysis reveals that in the post‐2012 era of heightened political discipline, intense competition now compels officials towards policy stability as a risk‐averse strategy for career advancement. This study provides direct evidence of a temporal shift in bureaucratic incentives, refining our understanding of governance in non‐Western centralized states.