Born leaders: China’s municipal party secretaries

ABSTRACT

Applying relative-age effect theory to China, we examine the political career development of municipal party secretaries. Our analysis presented in this paper provides substantial evidence in favour of those who were older in their cohort at school, i.e., those who were born in October and November are more likely than those who were born in June or July to be advanced to a party leadership position in an earlier time. This research fills in a gap in the field of RAE from a comparative perspective, and it also provides insights into long-term effects of relative age in China’s increasingly competitive political careers that challenge the conventional wisdom in political science literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Relative-age effect (RAE)
• municipal party secretary
• political leadership
• promotion
• china

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ There is no data on parents on the party secretaries in our survey. Parents being officials may have positive effects on their children choosing career paths but that effect we believe would apply to everyone. It might affect the degree of RAE but would not change its direction.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Qing Lan Project.