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Party Institutions and Authoritarian Power-Sharing: Evidence from China's Provincial Leader Appointment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2018

QINGJIE ZENG
QINGJIE ZENG*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Fudan [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent scholarship of comparative authoritarianism suggests that party institutions contribute to regime resilience by facilitating power-sharing among the party elites and preventing the paramount leaders’ abuse of power that undermines political stability. Existing studies tend to focus on the empirical association between party organizations and regime resilience, whereas the actual effects of institutions on elite behavior receive less attention. This paper conducts an in-depth study of China's appointment system to examine whether the CCP's power-sharing institutions indeed constrain the person- nel authority of the party's paramount leader. Using a unique dataset of provincial leadership appointment from 1992 to 2014, the empirical analysis reveals that the General Secretary enjoys what can be described as ‘constrained supremacy’ in the making of personnel decisions: the leader can boost his own position by providing favorable treatment to key supporters, but the formal arrangement of collective decision-making constrains rampant reward of patronage that would unsettle the balance among the regime's top elites. The findings of the paper lay bare the diffculty of capturing the inner workings of authoritarian politics with broad, cross-national indicators of regime type; they also illustrate the complicated interaction between formal institutions and informal, personal logic of exercising power in authoritarian regimes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 173 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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