Charles Cameron and Sanford Gordon continue the focus on governance by studying the incentives facing elected officials when voters rely on challengers and interest groups – ---"sentinels” – ---to sound “fire alarms” about incumbent behavior. The authors find that three factors affect the impact of sentinels: the verifiability of fire alarm information, potentially a critical issue in the age of “fake news”; the incentives of sentinels to withhold information, either to make incumbents look bad or to advance favored policies; and the ability of incumbents to counter sentinel bias through credit-claiming. Importantly, the presence of sentinels can lead incumbents to reduce the chance of bad news even at the expense of voter welfare, a perverse effect not fully eliminated by incumbent credit-claiming. The authors illustrate these insights with a case study of changes in the politics of criminal justice. The chapter concludes that fire- alarm oversight of incumbent politicians sometimes helps voters, but its potentially perverse effects render it a distant second -best to a fully informed electorate in ways that imply the media effects studied in Part II strongly affect elected officials.

This chapter argues that the Chinese leadership is trying to transition out of blunt force regulation by increasing investments in 1) conventional regulatory institutions, which offer more efficient, sustainable pollution control, and 2) bottom-up enforcement, where citizens are used as “fire alarms” to strengthen the threat of conventional enforcement institutions.Using a case study of antipollution protests in a wealthy Chinese city – a case that, at the outset, appeared likely to succeed at improving government enforcement – this chapter examines how the state’s ambivalence to civil society activism closes off channels for effective bottom-up enforcement. Further interview evidence reveals that as an authoritarian state, Chinese officials fear the accountability mechanisms (such as a free press, independent judiciary, and community activism) that make bottom-up enforcement so effective in other countries. These limitations have pushed the leadership to repeatedly return to blunt force solutions, suggesting that it is not just a transition phase.