Cards of a party regime : controlled election and mobilized representation in Chinese local congresses

Abstract

What do elections mean for a single-party regime? Can party-selected deputies do something meaningful for citizens in non-democracies? The dissertation explores how and under what conditions a single-party authoritarian regime instrumentalizes popularly elected congress to strengthen its rule in local society. It takes contemporary China as an empirical focus for this exploration. Instead of perceiving Chinese congress either simply as authoritarian window dressing or as an immediate catalyst for democratization, this research is devoted to examining the motivations, strategies, and behaviors of the party regime in playing the cards of congressional elections and representation to make its rule more robust and resilient.

This project mainly adopts comparative case study methods, with some quantitative data serving as supportive statistical evidence. As a whole, my thesis argues that congressional election and post-election representation are two cards of China’s party regime. By strategically downplaying input electoral competition but promoting output congressional representation, the communist regime has been striving to develop a mass-line democracy as an alternative to liberal democracy, which features the “Leninist trinity” of the Party’s leadership, the rule of law, and people’s democracy, as well as a new brand of mobilized representation relying on the accountability from the top down.