The impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control in China based on utility maximization

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis and an inspection of national governance systems and crisis response capabilities of countries globally. China has adopted a tough accountability system for officials and has succeeded in containing the spread of the pandemic. This study aimed to assess the impact of accountability on local officials’ behavior in the pandemic prevention and control based on the official promotion tournament theory and utility maximization analysis framework. Methods The panel data of 237 Chinese cities were extracted with local officials’ characteristics, confirmed cases, Baidu migration index, Baidu search index according to city names, and data were excluded with local officials’ relocation or sub-provincial cities between January 1, 2020 and May 5, 2020. Promotion gain and accountability cost were constructed by adopting promotion speed indicator, and the research hypotheses were assumed based on the utility maximization. It was the first time to apply the interaction model to empirically investigate the relationship between the promotion speed of local officials and the COVID-19 confirmed cases. Results Our study showed that the promotion speed of provincial governors and mayors significantly affected the number of confirmed cases (β = − 11.615, P < 0.01). There was a significant interaction between the promotion speeds of provincial governors and mayors (β = − 2594.1, P < 0.01), indicating that they had a coordinated effect on the pandemic control. Additionally, mayors with different promotion speeds made a significant difference in controlling the imported cases and those who promoted faster better controlled the imported cases (β = − 0.841, P < 0.01). Mayors with full-time postgraduate education, titles, and majors in science and engineering had a better effect on controlling the number of confirmed cases. Conclusions Our study provides evidence that the official accountability system has played an important role in containing the pandemic, which suggests that local officials motivated by the accountability system would respond to the pandemic actively for higher utility. Furthermore, provincial governors and mayors have played a coordinated effect in pandemic control. The above evidences reveal that implementing the official accountability system could improve the government’s emergency management capability and the efficiency of pandemic control. Therefore, adopting a strict accountability system could be effective in pandemic containment globally, especially in centralized countries.