Does the political-business revolving door, a phenomenon where retired public officials take lucrative positions in the private sector, emerge in non-democracies? If so, when, how, and why? My dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of revolving-door officials in authoritarian regimes and tests the theory through rigorous inquiry into firms in China. Scholars contend that firms enter the political marketplace primarily through bribery or by entrepreneurs running for public office in a weak institutional context. My dissertation challenges this conventional understanding by arguing that revolving-door channels become a dominant means of rent-seeking when the within-government career opportunities are rare for public officials and the private sector is profitable.

Chinese Revolving-Door Officials Database

The Chinese Revolving-Door Officials Database contains extensive demographic and career information of over 10,000 government officials who serve on the board of all Chinese publicly listed firms since the 2000s. The database is consist of three parts:

• compensation information for revolving-door officials, including salary, allowance, and stock shares;
• standardized career experience information;
• visualization of their political network.

The database is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Political Science at Duke University and Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute.

Chinese Public-Private Partnership Database

The Chinese Public-Private Partnership Database provides detailed information of all Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects contracted by various levels of governments in China from 2013. The database includes:

• contract details of public-private partnership projects
• visualization of public-private partnership networks