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ABSTRACT
Recent work challenging the “rubber stamp” view of authoritarian legislatures demonstrate that they are important arenas for policymaking. Yet their amending function remains understudied. To what extent is draft legislation modified in authoritarian parliaments? Why are some bills amended more than others? This article addresses these questions in the Chinese case, using a dataset covering 167 bills adopted by the National People's Congress or its Standing Committee from 2008 to 2022. I assess the degree of bill change by comparing bill content before and after parliamentary treatment with a text reuse method. Results show a moderately high level of amendment activity, with noticeable variations across bills. I argue that the amending role of the Chinese legislature serves a crucial mechanism for integrating and coordinating bureaucratic interests. I find that bills are modified to a greater extent if more ministerial and provincial stakeholders are involved within the legislative arena. This article provides systemic evidence supporting the power-sharing theory: legislative institutions compensate for the executive-level deficiencies and help manage intra-elite relations in policymaking. It does not confirm the influence of public opinion, casting doubt on the bottom-up account of bill change.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks editors and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. The author also thanks Tiffany Su, Yuqian He, and Aona Xu for their excellent research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See, for example, Barrett and Eshbaugh-Soha, “Presidential Success”; Gava et al., “Legislating or Rubber-stamping?”; Martin and Vanberg, “Legislative Institutions and Coalition Government.”
2 Notable exceptions are Noble's and Krol's studies. See Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments”; Krol, “Amending Legislatures in Authoritarian Regimes.”
3 Brancati, “Democratic Authoritarianism.”
4 Boix, Democracy and Redistribution; Gehlbach and Keefer, “Private Investment in Autocracies”; Jensen et al., “Authoritarian Legislatures and Political Risk”; North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment”; Wright, “Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain?”
5 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship; Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
6 Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics; Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism.”
7 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship; Gandhi and Przeworski, “Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion”; Gandhi and Przeworski, “Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats”; Malesky and Schuler, “Nodding or Needling.”
8 Manion, Information for Autocrats; Truex, Making Autocracy Work.
9 Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments,” 1421.
10 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship; Wiebrecht, “Between Elites and Opposition,” 1077
11 For details, see https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3136835/communist-party-not-chinas-only-political-party-there-are-eight
12 Wiebrecht, “Between Elites and Opposition,” 1081. Still, Liu focuses on the regime's control of elite groups and claims that cooptation remains one of the effective logics determining government responses in China, see Liu, “Cooptation without Opposition.”
13 King et al., “Reverse-engineering Censorship in China”; Qin et al., “Why does China Allow Freer Social Media?”; Xu, “To Repress or to Co-opt?”
14 Ibid.
15 Dimitrov, “Internal Government Assessments.”
16 Lorentzen, “Regularizing Rioting.”
17 Chen et al., “Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness”; Distelhorst and Hou, “Constituency Service under Nondemocratic Rule”; Manion, Information for Autocrats.
18 Truex, Making Autocracy Work.
19 Jiang, “NPC Amendments.”
20 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Svolik, “Power Sharing”; Boix and Svolik, “Foundations of Limited Authoritarian.”
21 See, for example, Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments”; Krol, “Amending Legislatures in Authoritarian Regimes”; Schuler, “Position Taking or Position Ducking?”
22 Williamson and Magaloni, “Legislatures and Policymaking,” 1533.
23 Boix and Svolik, “Foundations of Limited Authoritarian.”; Wiebrecht, “Between Elites and Opposition,” 1077.
24 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature,” 1385; Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking, 132.
25 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking; Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock.”
26 Liberthal and Oksenberg, Policy Making in China.
27 Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments.”
28 Ibid.
29 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; See note 27 above; Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock.”
30 Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival; Magaloni, “Credible Power-sharing”; Williamson and Magaloni, “Legislatures and Policy Making,” 1529.
31 Gallagher and Hanson, “Authoritarian Survival,” 201.
32 See note 26 above.
33 See note 26 above; Lieberthal and Lampton, Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making.
34 Chen, “Grounded Globalization,” 386.
35 Lampton, “A Plum for a Peach,” 40.
36 Li, “Regulatory Overlap and Regulatory Competition,” 733.
37 Shi, Factions and Finance in China, 54.
38 See note 26 above.
39 Shi, Factions and Finance in China; Steinberg and Shih, “Interest Group Influence.”
40 A notable exception is Tanner. See Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking.
41 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock.”
42 Truex, Making Autocracy Work, 8.
43 Myerson, “The Autocrat's Credibility Problem”; Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
44 North and Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment.”
45 See article 99 of the Legislation Law of the PRC.
46 Jiang, “The Logic of Statute Ambiguity.”
47 This sequence is likely common to many democracies and non-democracies. Tanner provides a more detailed description of China's legislative process by specifying the different stages and arenas for lawmaking. Laver, “Legislatures and Parliaments,” 125-126; Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments,” 1451; Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking.
48 Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking.
49 Some bills (constitutional revisions, political laws, important economic and administrative laws) must also be reviewed in party central apparatus such as Central Committee of the Communist Party, Politburo and its Standing Committee and receive approval from the party leadership before legislative entry. For details, see note 48 above.
50 See article 39 of the Legislation Law.
51 For example, Zheng and Meng find that the inclusion of local governments in the opinion solicitation process increases the proportion of draft departmental legislation being amended. See Zheng and Meng, “Lifa yijian zhengji zhidu.”
52 Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking, 211.
53 See note 26 above.
54 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock,” 1483-4; Tanner, The Politics of Lawmaking, 220.
55 Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock.”
56 See note 27 above.
57 See note 48 above; Tanner, “How a Bill Becomes a Law.”
58 Ibid.
59 Susan, “The Chinese Political System,” 71; See note 26 above.
60 It bears noting that the Legislation Law does not require the NPC to conduct three deliberations of bill placed on the agenda of an NPC session. This is because NPC convenes only once a year for about two weeks, and is not in charge of legislative activities most of the year. The three-deliberation norm applies to bills deliberated by the NPCSC, who exercises legislative power when the NPC is not in session. See article 32&33 of the Legislation Law https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2023-03/14/content_5746569.htm
61 See article 58 of the Legislation Law.
62 See article 21&34 of the Legislation Law.
63 The LAC is a permanent working body of the NPC Standing Committee. It is established to provide services to the NPC and its Standing Committee, such as drafting legislative plans, soliciting opinions on law drafts, conducting research and assessments of draft laws, etc. For more details, see https://npcobserver.com/2018/06/25/
64 Cai, Zhongguo renmin daibiao dahui, 302.
65 See article 41 of the Legislation Law and https://npcobserver.com/2018/06/25/
66 See article 23&36 of the Legislation Law. It is said that the CLC has delegated a significant portion of its day-to-day tasks to the LAC, which in practice also proposes to the CLC suggested amendments to pending bills based on the opinions it gathered. For details, see https://npcobserver.com/2018/06/25/ and http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/fgw001/202009/37a38fef089e499bb63b9d58ceda9ba4.shtml
67 See article 32 of the Legislation Law.
68 Like a revision report, a deliberation result report should state any disagreement on important matters. In addition, the Law Committee should offer an explanation to the relevant special committee if suggestions provided by the latter is not adopted.
69 See article 27&44 of the Legislation Law.
70 Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock,” 1464.
71 Bills grouped in a package are typically minor revisions to existing laws and their introduced drafts were rarely published. This article thus excludes bills introduced in the form of package legislation between 2008 and 2022 (N = 200). Note that this exclusion might lead to an increase in the level of bill change, given that packaged bills generally underwent very small changes according to their legislative reports.
72 Casas et al., “More Effective Than We Thought”; Cross and Hermansson, “Legislative Amendments and Informal Politics”; Gava et al., “Legislating or Rubber-stamping?”; Linder et al., “Text as Policy”; van den Dool, “Never Again,” 89; Wilkerson et al., “Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures.”
73 Gava et al., “Legislating or Rubber-stamping?”
74 I varied the value of n and find that all n-grams strongly correlate. See Figure 3 in the Appendix.
75 See note 72 above.
76 See note 54 above.
77 Truex, “Authoritarian Gridlock?” 1481.
78 Martin and Vanberg, “Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review”; Martin and Vanberg, Parliaments and Coalitions; Pedrazzani and Zucchini, “Horses and Hippos.”
79 Zbíral et al., “Perpetual Scrutiny?” 495.
80 Martin and Vanberg, Parliaments and Coalitions, 114; Noble, “Authoritarian Amendments,” 1442; Pedrazzani and Zucchini, “Horses and Hippos,” 702.
81 Gelman, “Scaling Regression Inputs.”
82 Ibid.
83 Zbíral et al., “Perpetual Scrutiny?” 495.
84 See note 19 above.
85 Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature.”
86 Krol, “Amending Legislatures in Authoritarian Regimes”; See note 27 above.
87 See note 54 above; Yang and Yu, “Zhongguo lifa xiaolü.”
88 Chen et al., “Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness”; Meng et al., “Conditional Receptivity to Citizen Participation”; Truex, “Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits.”
89 Jiang, “Leading Small Groups,” 119.
90 Lieberthal, “Introduction”; See note 26 above.
91 Gandhi et al., “Legislatures and Legislative Politics Without Democracy,” 1364; See note 54 above.
92 See note 18 above.
93 See note 19 above.
94 Liu finds that demands from within and below are balanced in a Chinese local legislature, see Liu, “Policy Influence of Delegates.”
95 Gandhi et al., “Legislatures and Legislative Politics Without Democracy,” 1364; Lü et al., “Policy Coalition in an Authoritarian Legislature”; See note 27 above.
96 See note 19 above.
97 See note 17 above.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jiying Jiang
Jiying Jiang is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Government and Public Administration at the University of Macau. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on authoritarian institutions, legislative politics, policymaking, and China.