How to Assess Village Elections in China

Abstract

In assessing Chinese village elections we must sort and discriminate as we consult the ‘mountain of evidence’ that has accumulated over the past two decades. We can find anecdotal evidence to support practically any claim about village democratization, but from such stories we can learn nothing about the status, trends, or patterns of village democratization. This article evaluates what we can learn and have learned about grassroots democratization in the Chinese countryside from nationally and locally representative sample survey data.

Notes

^*Melanie Manion is professor of political science and public affairs at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her most recent book is Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong (Harvard University Press, 2004). Her current research project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, uses archival study, qualitative field research, and representative sample surveys to investigate how Chinese local congresses navigate their agency relationships with ordinary citizens and the communist party in the ongoing transformation from descriptive to substantive representation

^1. Kevin J. O'Brien and Rongbin Han, ‘Path to democracy? Assessing village elections in China’, Journal of Contemporary China 18(60), (June 2009).

^2. Lily L. Tsai, ‘Governing one million rural communities after two decades: are China's village elections improving?’, paper prepared for the Conference on Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation, Stanford University, 2–3 November 2007. In addition, Tianjian Shi, working with the Social Survey Research Center at People's University in Beijing, conducted nationally representative sample surveys in 1990–1991 and 1993–1994. The latter is the basis for his estimate that 54% of villages had held contested elections by 1994 and his finding of curvilinear relationships between local economic development and implementation of electoral contestation. See Tianjian Shi, ‘Economic development and village elections in rural China’, Journal of Contemporary China 8(22), (November 1999), pp. 425–442.

^3. Implementation ranges from 95 to 99%.

^4. Moreover, so long as data are from a good-sized probabilistically selected representative sample in the locality, the statistical inferences about trends and patterns can often be reliably generalized beyond the sample. See Melanie Manion, ‘Survey research in the study of contemporary China: learning from local samples’, China Quarterly no. 139, (September 1994), pp. 741–765.

^5. See also the discussion in Bjorn Alpermann, ‘Institutionalizing village governance in China’, Journal of Contemporary China 18(60), (June 2009).

^6. In studies of Chinese village elections, specific variables usually include (at least) candidate nomination, electoral contestation, and voting processes.

^7. See, for example, M. Kent Jennings, ‘Local problem agendas in the Chinese countryside as viewed by cadres and villagers’, Acta Politica 38(4), (December 2003), pp. 313–332; and Melanie Manion, ‘The electoral connection in the Chinese countryside’, American Political Science Review 90(4), (December 1996), pp. 736–748.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Melanie Manion

8 *Melanie Manion is professor of political science and public affairs at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her most recent book is Corruption by Design: Building Clean Government in Mainland China and Hong Kong (Harvard University Press, 2004). Her current research project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, uses archival study, qualitative field research, and representative sample surveys to investigate how Chinese local congresses navigate their agency relationships with ordinary citizens and the communist party in the ongoing transformation from descriptive to substantive representation