Journal Articles

Good Types in Authoritarian Elections: The Selectoral Connection in Chinese Local Congresses

---

A new electoral design for subnational congress elections in China allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections. Authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter’s agency relationship with politicians. Borrowing from the literature on political selection, I theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the adverse selection problem: Chinese voters can use their electoral power to select “good types,” with personal qualities that signal they will reliably represent local interests. I analyze original data from a survey of 4,071 Chinese local congressmen and women, including voter nominees and communist party nominees. I find that voters do in fact overcome coordination difficulties to nominate and elect “good types.” In contacting politicians about local problems after the elections, however, voters hedge their bets by contacting regime insiders too. At these very local levels, congressional representation by means of political selection co-exists with communist party nominating and veto power in the electoral process.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Comparative Political Studies

Call Number

-

Publisher

Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications., 2017

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

00104140

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Volume 50, Issue 3, March 2017; pp. 362–394

Subject(s)

Elections
China
Representation
congresses

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment