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Authoritarian Parochialism: Local Congressional Representation in China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Melanie Manion
Melanie Manion*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article draws on evidence from loosely structured interviews and data from original surveys of 5,130 delegates in township, county and municipal congresses to argue that congressional representation unfolds as authoritarian parochialism in China. It makes three new arguments. First, popularly elected local congresses that once only mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, through demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, now work as substantively representative institutions. Chinese local congressmen and women view themselves and act as “delegates,” not Burkean trustees or Leninist party agents. Second, this congressional representation is not commonly expressed in the quintessentially legislative activities familiar in other regime types. Rather, it is an extra-legislative variant of pork-barrel politics: parochial activity by delegates to deliver targeted public goods to the geographic constituency. Third, this authoritarian parochialism is due to institutional arrangements and regime priorities, some common to single-party dictatorships and some distinct to Chinese authoritarianism.

Keywords

Chinarepresentationcongresspork-barrel politics
Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 218 , June 2014 , pp. 311 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2014 

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Footnotes

*

A version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Assessing the Quality of Governance in China, organized by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. I thank discussants and other workshop participants for their helpful comments. I thank Yousun Chung, Brandon Lamson and Vera (Cai) Zuo for research assistance. I thank David Canon for talking with me about American congressional politics. I thank Shen Mingming, Yang Ming, Yan Jie, and others at the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University for outstanding collaboration on the survey work. The Fulbright Foundation and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School supported qualitative fieldwork. National Science Foundation Political Science Award no. 0616527 supported survey research. I thank all these agencies.

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