In addition to published materials, this book relies greatly on qualitative interview evidence and data from original probability sample surveys. These interviews and surveys were conducted over a period of several years, mostly from 2007 to 2009, in Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai, Hebei, Shandong, Anhui, Hunan, and Zhejiang, as detailed in this appendix.

Qualitative Evidence

Different sorts of qualitative evidence served different purposes in the development of this project. Qualitative evidence includes my direct observation of township congress proceedings in Chongqing, an exploratory survey of township congress delegates in Anhui, and 65 loosely structured interviews I conducted, most of them with congress officials or ordinary delegates in municipal, county, and township congresses in five provinces. Table A.1 identifies the interview subjects by level (where relevant), type of institution, and position in the workplace. By interview, I refer to a meeting arranged explicitly to talk about local congress matters, in which I asked questions and openly took notes. I do not include the many discussions and informal conversations with Chinese over the years in which any of these conditions were absent, although such discussions and conversations certainly illuminated many issues for me.

In January 1999, other participants and I, in a Carter Center delegation to Chongqing, observed direct elections of township delegates and the full first session of a township congress, including discussions among small groups of delegates, candidate nominations, and elections (by delegates) of congress and government leaders. Although we were surely not inconspicuous observers, the congress session did not appear to be a staged performance. During discussions, delegates complained repeatedly about lack of roads connecting some villages to the town, inconvenience of birth control checks for village women, nonresponsiveness of the township government, and poor work style of township government officials. The opportunity to observe congress elections and a full congress session and to interview congress, government, and Communist Party officials, reported in part in Manion (2000), constitutes the first stage of my fieldwork on Chinese local congresses. The Carter Center trip changed my prior view of the congresses as institutionally uninteresting.

In 2004 and 2005, I was able to take up seriously my interest in local congresses. In addition to reading an exciting new empirical literature on the congresses, I interviewed a handful of the key scholars who had produced it.

Long after the third wave of democratization that began in the mid-1970s, autocracies abound: by a recent count (Svolik 2012), autocratic regimes are in place in nearly 40 percent of countries. The modal variant now is electoral authoritarianism, in which opposition parties regularly compete against a ruling party in elections that are organized to prevent alternation of power. Even in far more repressive military, monarchical, and single-party autocracies, however, rulers have opened the political playing field to more players through nominally democratic institutions, such as elections and congresses. China, the most powerful autocracy, is no exception.

This book investigates the new representation unfolding in Chinese local congresses that, since 1980, are popularly elected in elections featuring legally mandated contestation, secret ballots, and voter nomination of candidates. Chinese congresses disappeared in 1966, with the radical attack on all institutions except the army in the Cultural Revolution engineered by Mao. In the late 1970s, after twelve chaotic years, the congresses were reinstated and renewed. Elections and congresses are not defining features of Chinese autocracy today—far from it. Even so, although rulers in Beijing regularly proclaim their rejection of liberal democratic values, post-Mao political reform includes nominally democratic institutions, such as elections and congresses. I show in this book that the priorities and problems of ordinary Chinese at the grassroots significantly influence both who gets elected to township and county congresses and what the congresses do after they are elected. I argue that these outcomes are the result of rules—or, more precisely old and new institutionalized arrangements. Presumably, Chinese autocrats, at the top of a single-party political hierarchy modeled on Leninist principles, have not organized themselves to undermine the foundations of their Communist Party state. Do arrangements that motivate the powerful to respond to ordinary citizens strengthen autocracy? If so, how? In answering these questions, I rethink the Chinese model of “authoritarian resilience” (Nathan 2003, 2006), a touchstone or foil in much scholarship on Chinese politics, and contribute to a growing literature on the comparative politics of authoritarianism.

Key Findings

From what we know, nominally democratic institutions are a good wager for autocrats: elections in autocracies are associated not with democratic transition (Brownlee 2007) but with regime longevity (Geddes 1999), and congresses are associated with growth (Gandhi 2008).

As described in Chapter 1, popular elections of local congresses in China now feature legally mandated contestation and secret ballots, both major breaks from the Maoist past. Even so, a Chinese street vendor shared with me his dismissal of the elections as a waste of time: “The results have all been worked out ahead of time. Voting is not going to affect the outcome.” The inference that the game is rigged from the outset reflects pessimism about voter influence in the candidate selection process and, by implication, in elections. Quite apart from any political resonance it may have, is it a reasonable inference? Certainly, even far below the center of power in Beijing and after some 30 years of reform, voter choices at the ballot box are greatly restricted. Yet, candidate selection for local congresses is also newly inclusive. Indeed, as I elaborate in this chapter, most township and county congress nominees are voter (not party) nominees, and most candidates on the ballot (as well as most elected delegates) are voter-nominated candidates. To what extent does Communist Party power effectively annul electoral voice for ordinary Chinese in township and county congress elections?

Most of the literature in comparative politics that is directly relevant to this question treats elections as the autocrat's solution to her or his monitoring problem: elections enlist ordinary citizens to convey information, with votes, about the performance of politicians at lower levels (see Geddes 2006; Magaloni 2006; Brownlee 2007; Gandhi 2008; Malesky and Schuler 2008; Simpser 2013). To help solve the autocrat's monitoring problem, elections need not provide perfect information about popular preferences, of course, but it seems they must at least gauge them approximately. That is, elections cannot be managed so as to deprive votes of any informational worth. This seems to suggest that such elections must also go at least some way toward solving the voter's monitoring problem. How else to enlist voters to gauge the performance of politicians? Yet, even in liberal democracies, monitoring politicians is difficult, sanctioning their bad performance in office often ineffective (see Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999). For a variety of reasons reviewed in this book's introduction, autocracies are worse (in fact, much worse) than are liberal democracies at solving the moral hazard problem for voters in their agency relationship with politicians.

Rulers in Beijing in the late 1970s drew up a design to transform local congresses from institutions that mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, with merely demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, to substantively representative institutions. Certainly, in qualitative interviews, congress delegates and Chinese congress scholars widely suggest a notion of congressional representation along these lines has taken hold of the rhetoric of representation. Following are illustrative quotes from a congress scholar and a township congress chair, respectively.

In this chapter, I take up this question of substantive congressional representation. In the understanding and actions of already elected congress delegates, how and how much have ordinary Chinese been transformed into constituents?

To be sure, the implications for congress composition of the selectoral connection studied in Chapter 2 are at the same time implications for substantive congressional representation. Yet many township and county congress delegates are party (not voter) nominees. Moreover, there is no mechanism to seat voter nominees in the indirectly elected congresses at and above the municipality. More to the point, for ordinary Chinese, even supposing that the “good types” described in Chapter 2 are in principle good bets for substantive congressional representation, what elected delegates actually do is an entirely different empirical question from the one studied in that chapter.

Congresses in the People's Republic of China were first elected in 1953 and then dissolved in 1966 with the onset of the Cultural Revolution. They reemerged only in the late 1970s as part of a broad post-Mao exercise in building institutions to constrain powerful dictators. Post-Mao congresses differ somewhat in design from the version worked out in the 1950s, soon after the communists won power. The design also changed over time, so it is different now not only from its earliest antecedent but also from the version inaugurated in the late 1970s. Rulers in Beijing made these design choices. The configuration of features that further (and also frustrate) a correspondence between “what citizens want and what policy makers do” (Powell 2004, 273) defines a distinct model of Chinese congressional representation. This chapter describes these features to begin to illuminate the underlying model, the actual workings of which I investigate in Chapters 2 through 5.

The most obvious features of Chinese congressional design are striking reflections of autocracy. A single Communist Party monopolizes organized political power in China, enforcing a ban on political organizations outside the party and on political factions within it. Party-led election committees vet nominees and decide which names appear as candidates on ballots. Local authorities routinely harass independent candidates and ensure their names rarely appear on ballots. The law places serious limits on electoral campaigning; in practice, most local authorities routinely impose even more serious restrictions. Only township and county congresses emerge from popular elections; others are elected, tier by tier, by congresses one level down in the territorial hierarchy. In large part as a result of these features, communists by far numerically dominate all congresses, from the National People's Congress (NPC) down to the township congresses (Interview 17-0503). In the aggregate, by congress level, recent figures on Communist Party majorities range from 68 to 74 percent (Shi, Guo, and Liu 2009, 290), depending on congress level, with the proportion of communists lowest in township congresses. Finally and not least of all, the congresses are mostly large amateur assemblies that meet infrequently and briefly. They typically ratify policies already worked out by a much smaller governing elite.

The underlying model of congressional representation that emerges from the description in this chapter is more nuanced than is suggested by the enumeration of these features, however.

As described in previous chapters, popular elections of local congresses now feature legally mandated contestation, secret ballots, and voter nomination of candidates. I argue that these new electoral arrangements, superimposed on the decades-old Communist Party personnel management system, create a structure of incentives such that party and government executives, with power over congress composition and allocation of local public goods, pay attention to congresses. More to the point, by implication, they pay attention to ordinary citizens—the “society” in the social stability that is now an imperative target for official career advancement. All the same, voters cannot really be characterized as veto players in the electoral process: local party committees have too much power to set the agenda. The street vendor quoted in Chapter 2 expressed the conventional wisdom that the electoral game is rigged, reflecting deep pessimism about the influence of ordinary Chinese. Similar to most conventional wisdom everywhere, the inference fails to capture nuances—but the perspective of the Chinese mass public is an important complement to the investigation in previous chapters. However well or poorly ordinary Chinese understand the nuances of party, government, and congressional power, their perspective has political resonance. It is also relevant to this book's assessment of local congressional representation as an institution. This chapter brings ordinary Chinese, the putative principals of congress delegates, directly into the study of representation. If, as argued in previous chapters, new and old institutionalized arrangements provide opportunities and incentives for local congress delegates to represent constituents, how and how much does the Chinese mass public see it this way?

To address this question, I turn to the surveys of 983 ordinary citizens across 46 voting districts in 23 townships of surveyed township congress delegates in Anhui, Hunan, and Zhejiang. All are rural localities, with a single village constituting a voting district in all but one instance—so the respondents in this sample of constituents are also all villagers. Because political engagement in the countryside generally lags behind that in urban China, this focus constitutes something of a hard test. At the same time, it offers a useful vantage point by which to consider the congresses: namely, popularly elected village committees, introduced widely in the late 1980s, about a decade after reinstatement of local congresses.

I begin in Section I with a brief discussion of village committees.

This book tells two parallel stories. The first story, told mainly in Chapters 1 to 3, is a story of representation by design. New electoral arrangements structure opportunities for representation; the decades-old Communist Party personnel management system assures the relevance of representation. In these chapters, representation in Chinese local congresses is an institutionalized flow of local knowledge from ordinary citizens and amateur congress delegates at the grassroots to powerful executives in local party committees and governments, to which the powerful respond. In particular, representation is an input in executive decisions about where to allocate what local public goods as a strategically responsive act of local governance.

Congress delegates are the pivot in this story. Autocracies, especially single-party autocracies, are much worse than are liberal democracies at solving the fundamental moral hazard problem for voters in their agency relationship with politicians. With little to help ordinary citizens monitor what congresses do, elections in autocracies cannot effectively sanction (and thereby constrain) congress delegates to be accountable to their constituents. Nonetheless, delegates in Chinese local congresses mostly see themselves and act as agents of their constituents. Why? An institutionalized “propitious selection” into congresses of a substantial number of “good types,” individuals inclined by their personal characteristics to represent their constituents, is only part of the story. Legally mandated contested elections, secret ballots, and voter nominees make electoral legitimacy a uniquely flattering story for all winners of popular elections. Beliefs of congress delegates, even an exaggerated sense of self-importance in their relationship to local governments, are mostly supportive of representation. That electoral legitimacy is also the official story of why delegates are delegates does not make it a sham. Indeed, for ambitious “governing types,” including delegates who are also officials in local party and government agencies, the official story is part of the incentive structure in a system of career advancement managed by the Communist Party. In sum, local congressional representation in China, as presented empirically in Chapters 1 to 3, is an institution in the standard way: it is a regularized pattern of actions and beliefs, structured by incentives, although not the incentives suggested by the classic agency perspective on elections in the literature on modern political economy. All this, however, is a story about political elites.

How accurate are delegate reports that easily lend themselves to an exaggeration of the delegates’ roles? The best candidate for a reliability check is a straightforward behavioral question on constituent contacting, which we asked of congress delegates and a probability sample of the ordinary mass public in a subsample of voting districts in twenty-three surveyed townships. We asked township congress delegates the first of the four questions below and villagers the three that follow:

To construct a constituent contacting measure from delegate responses, I transformed response categories into values with 0 and 30 as extreme values and midpoints for the middle four categories. I then computed yearly averages, taking into account the lapse of time between the beginning of the delegate's term and the survey. On average, in the twenty-six surveyed townships, township delegates with no concurrent congress seat report 9.8 such contacts per year (or 13.6 per thousand constituents). In the twenty-three townships in which we also conducted surveys of villagers, the average is 9.6 contacts per year.

Three percent of villagers surveyed report contacting an official. Of these, 72 percent report contacting a township congress delegate, and 24 percent report contacting a county congress delegate. Of the 63 percent who recall when the contact was made, 85 percent report it was the year of the survey or the year or two before it.

My research assistant Daisy Bui Ying Chung conducted the search for blog posts and reposts of independent candidates on Sina Weibo and coded candidate postings for the Chapter 5 discussion of candidate electoral objectives. She began her search with Li Fan's World and China Institute website (http://www.world-china.org/); the Center for the Study of the People's Congress and Foreign Legislatures website (http://www.e-cpcs.org/), affiliated with Peking University's Center for the Study of the People's Congress and Legislatures and the Research Institute on Constitutional Government of the Chinese University of Politics and Law; Fudan University's Elections and People's Congress Center website (http://www.fepc.org.cn/); and the Carter Center's China Elections and Government website (http://chinaelectionsblog.net/). She then used search engines Baidu and especially Duxiu. An effective search method was to link keywords from one article to find others. She was able to access blogs and even deleted reposts. Two blogs provided unofficial lists of independent candidates by name. An October 2011 blog listed 90 candidates; a January 2012 blog listed 103 candidates. Eliminating overlap and adding names found through searches produced a list of 152 independent candidates, whose blog posts and reposts could be searched by candidate name. Of the 152, she found sufficient information in blog posts and reposts to write up brief biographies and code electoral objectives of 61 independent candidates. This includes 22 of the 23 members of Beijing proto-parties.