Good Friends of Communism: The Democratic Parties and Authoritarian Rule in China
Embargo until
2022-05-01
Date
2018-04-03
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation project studies an authoritarian regime from the perspective of party politics. While most party politics scholars study political parties, party systems and political behavior in democracies, this dissertation analyzes the dynamics of noncompetitive party politics in authoritarian contexts by focusing on China’s eight non-communist political parties.
This project studies two distinct but related puzzles: Why do people join the non-communist political parties (also known as the democratic parties) in communist China and why is China’s authoritarian rule so resilient despite the internal and external challenges? Even though the democratic parties today have 1.1 million elite members, few scholars have explored their motivations for joining these non-ruling parties and the implications for authoritarian rule in China. The existing literature on authoritarian resilience in China has studied the issue mainly from institutional, political economy and social perspectives. These explanations have significantly advanced our knowledge about authoritarian rule in China. Yet, they all neglect a crucial political actor: China’s powerful non-communist parties. By relying on multiple methods consisting of qualitative and quantitative analyses, I argue that people join these democratic parties in China since the latter can provide (1) faster upward political mobility; (2) a protected “voice”; and (3) a sense of organizational belonging. Contrary to conventional assumptions that these non-communist parties are just window dressing organizations in one-party regimes, I argue that the Chinese Communist Party (the ruling party) allows the democratic parties to exist and develop since they can, paradoxically, contribute to authoritarian resilience through three mechanisms: information sharing, social (elite) control and public policy innovation. To be specific, these non-communist parties help the Communist Party to solve the information blocking problem which always plagues authoritarian regimes, recruit elites into the regime and reduce political dissidents through socializing potential challengers, and more importantly, actively promote social and economic governance by providing scientific and realistic policy reform proposals.
This dissertation is the first systematic effort to study non-communist parties in contemporary China by using original data. It challenges prominent theories of authoritarian politics and party politics, which assume that these non-communist political parties either serve as window dressing for the communist parties or as potential vehicles for democratization. This project contributes to a better understanding of party politics and authoritarian rule in China and highlights the significance of studying noncompetitive party politics in the world.
Description
Keywords
China, non-communist parties