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... Show moreWhat 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. Show less
The analysis of the relationship between legitimacy and reform is complex. This is because 'political reform' consists of an array of institutional reforms.The general question guiding this project... Show moreThe analysis of the relationship between legitimacy and reform is complex. This is because 'political reform' consists of an array of institutional reforms.The general question guiding this project is whether the introduction of reform helps boost the legitimacy of the democratic system: does the impact of reform on legitimacy vary with the type of reform, or with the process of reform. To answer these questions, this study also seeks to establish how many reforms have taken place, what types of reform have been introduced and under what circumstances these reforms occur. Show less
