Lily Tsai's extensively researched and carefully argued book is an important addition to the political science literature on the social bases of state effectiveness. While most studies of state effectiveness focus on political institutions and economic conditions, this one looks instead at social structures. Tsai's focus is on rural China, home to two-thirds of China's population, where at least some local governments have delivered public goods like paved roads, rainproof classrooms, and running water.

The starting point of the book is an original survey of public goods provision in 316 villages (which won Tsai the APSA Comparative Democratization prize for field work in 2005) that uncovers a puzzle: Electoral institutions, income levels, and top-down accountability mechanisms cannot explain differences in the provision of public goods.

Tsai's inductive explanation is that various forms of “embedding and encompassing solidary groups” at the village level create moral obligations on village rulers to perform well. Lineage groups and temple associations are the best examples of this in rural China: Where they are thriving and where they encompass the local leadership, public goods provision is better. This hypothesis is tested on the survey using six different types of public goods provision. The existence of such groups powerfully predicts variations in public goods provision, holding other factors constant. Ironically, Tsai's work implies that the “Beijing model” of strong top-down authoritarian rule is based on false premises, at least as far as rural China is concerned.

Thus, the most important finding of this book, backed up by an artful use of regression analysis, is that social norms and obligations matter to governance and development. Tsai studiously avoids using the term “legitimacy” in her work. Indeed, she sometimes uses the term in opposition to moral standing. (“Opportunities to earn moral authority became all the more valuable when villagers began to question the legitimacy of village government officials”; p. 107.) But this venerable old term is what her theory is about. Her central argument is about how virtuous cycles of legitimation are created. Her answer is that they are created when officials are linked to underlying social norms via solidary groups.

The main theoretical contribution here is to stake out a middle ground between social capital theories that exclude the state and patron–client theories that include the state in an amoral way. The author's solution is, instead, a moral alliance between state and society, along the lines of Rousseau's social contract. Her work should be read in this larger social contract tradition in comparative politics that includes works by Margaret Levi (Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism, 1997), Tom Tyler (Why People Obey the Law, 1990), and Bo Rothstein (Social Traps and the Problem of Trust, 2005).

This is a methodologically important work. It shows how cultural and norm-based theories can be studied in just as rigorous a fashion as economistic theories. One can quibble with Tsai's interpretation of the results, of course (indeed, a great virtue of the book is its provision of detailed regression tables). For instance, several of the controls—in particular, a village's distance from the county seat as well as the existence of private enterprises and, in some cases, income levels—explain more of the variations in public goods provisions than solidary groups. While highly significant, solidary groups do not pull their weight as much. Villages with active temple halls have a 59% chance of having paved roads, versus 48% for those without, while villages with inclusive lineage groups have a 76% chance of paved roads versus 49% for those without (the mean for all villages is 50%).

A bigger question is Tsai's suggestion that solidary groups represent an effective replacement for formal institutions of accountability (as the title suggests). This claim echoes an argument made recently about the success of capitalism in China by Kellee Tsai (no relation) in Capitalism Without Democracy (2007). Lily Tsai argues that we should “move away from the emphasis” on formal institutions (p. 267) in favor of a study of such informal social institutions. Yet while this may aid in understanding accountability in rural China, it does not necessarily aid in improving it, for two reasons.

First, such groups are quite unusual—only 14% of villages have temple groups and only 7% have single lineage groups. The reason is that they are largely historical artifacts. Such groups “were more likely to appear in villages that had a legacy of such groups from before 1949” (p. 104). In many cases, their origins go back to highly contingent events, such the formation of a local Chinese opera troupe in the 1930s in one village. This is why the average provision of public goods in the villages she surveys is so abysmal: only 50% had paved roads, 47% running water, 13% paved pathways, and 11% rainproof classrooms. Most villages do not have encompassing solidary groups and, thus, most village governments are not accountable, contrary to the sense given by the book's title. Her study is about “pockets of good governance” (p. 267) amidst a wide swatch of misrule.

Secondly, the development of alternative methods of accountability must depend in part on the liberalization of formal institutions. The ability of villages to “create” such groups (and the inability of the churches that she finds have been neutered to take on this function) is at present hampered by the repressive formal institutions in the country. Thinking prescriptively, accountability would seem to depend upon formal liberalization, if not democracy.

Accountability Without Democracy will be a useful classroom and research tool for social scientists working in many distinctive fields: the politics of China, authoritarian regimes, comparative development, state building, and political sociology. It raises the bar on what good research on China should look like, and in the process, introduces a compelling new explanation of an important political outcome.