Understanding China's Grassroots Elections
GRASSROOTS ELECTIONS IN CHINA, Kevin J. O'Brien and Suisheng Zhao, eds., pp. xi-xvi, Routledge, 2010
11 Pages Posted: 29 May 2010 Last revised: 15 Aug 2011
Date Written: August 14, 2011
Abstract
China's grassroots elections reflect the stop-and-go progress of political reform itself. Not a sham, they are, like other liberal institutions in an illiberal polity, part of a strategy designed to help one-party rule endure. Big, unintended consequences may yet emerge, but to this point, local elections operate in a limited context and have local effects. From their beginnings, elections arose out of a state-building as much as a democratizing impulse, and, several decades later, they may be legitimating the current regime rather than serving as a harbinger of systemic change.
This book also demonstrates that research methods are changing as surveyers and ethnographers enter the field. (The first articles by economists and game theorists are only now beginning to appear). Research topics are also changing. Careful examination of election procedures and a lively debate over whether richer or poorer villages hold better elections is giving way to a focus on the consequences of balloting. Consequences, in the contemporary way of thinking, are understood broadly, including effects on: the ‘exercise of power’; relations between elected bodies and Party organizations; procedural aspects of post-election governance; corruption; land allocation; fiscal transfers; regime legitimacy; feelings of empowerment; and the development of citizenship consciousness. Several recent studies have also stressed that elections are just one means to enhance accountability, and perhaps not the most effective one.
Cross-national comparison and dialogue with those who study elections in other authoritarian regimes remains, however, underdeveloped.
Keywords: local elections, voting, China, political reform, regime change
JEL Classification: 053, P30
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation