A Study on the Behavioral Patterns of Top Local Political Leaders: A Longitudinal Analysis Based on Evidence from City A in Central China

Principal local officials are pivotal actors in shaping local governance, yet foundational knowledge about how they fulfill their duties remains significantly underdeveloped. Constrained by limited transparency and high sensitivity, principal local officials are frequently reduced to abstract units such as “performance-rational actors” or “political entrepreneurs”, while the inherent complexity of their behavior is often overlooked.

This study constructs a rare fine-grained textual dataset by collecting short updates on the daily administrative activities of municipal party secretaries and mayors as found on City A's Party History website. The dataset includes information on four party secretaries and six mayors. Using natural language processing techniques and structured topic modeling methods, the dataset contains approximately 7,000 uniformly distributed records of administrative behavior, totaling around 2.73 million words. Through covariate modeling analysis, we estimate the types of administrative themes reflected in the texts. Subsequently, using covariates such as official characteristics, tenure, and period of time in office, we decompose and identify the core features of the changes in their administrative behavior. This approach achieves a quantitative depiction of the daily administrative behavior of local officials, offering a comprehensive view of the time allocation patterns among local political elites.

The study finds that the administrative behavior of principal municipal officials is influenced by three factors: trends driven by macro political and economic factors, cyclical patterns formed by factors relating to tenure, and randomness introduced by personal traits. However, the impact of these factors varies significantly across different types of administrative behavior. Although this analysis is based on a specific city, there are no particularly pronounced systemic differences between this city and most other Chinese cities. Thus, the results presented in the paper reflect the relatively stable aggregate characteristics, as observed across several principal officials. Given the replicable nature of China's cadre management and administrative system structure, we have reason to believe that the findings from this study are also relevant for understanding the behavior of principal party and government officials in other municipalities.

By analyzing and excavating historically valuable local party and government records, this article uncovers fundamental patterns in the administrative behavior of principal local officials, thus providing new evidence to test existing theoretical conjectures.