HOME 主页 VITA 简历 RESEARCH 研究 TEACHING 教学 RESOURCES 资源 WUHAN 武汉 历代纪元

Creative Commons [版权许可]

Comparing Western Democracies and Mainland China: Political Participation

Gang GUO
Department of Political Science
University of Rochester
Saturday, June 17th, 2000

A. Suppose you are consulted by a team of political scientists who have exposure, in their research and personal experience, only to the politics of established liberal democracies in the advanced industrialized West. They are designing a cross-national study of political participation, which will include mainland China as one of several countries for comparison. Leaving aside here the practical difficulties associated with conducting research in China, describe to them some conceptual issues and problems raised by this comparison. Discuss your views on the extent to which and ways in which the literature on political participation in western democracies is relevant and helpful (or not) to the study of political participation in mainland China, making specific reference to that literature.

In a cross-national study of political participation involving mainland China, two peculiarities to mainland China are among those that, if not properly addressed, would seriously affect the validity and credibility of the research project. The first is that mainland China today, despite rapid social and economic (and even, to some extent, political) transformations in the past two decades, retains the essential features of a Leninist party-state, which has fundamental differences from Western liberal democracies. The second peculiarity is that after decades of inconsistent modernization efforts by the party-state, mainland China is still a mostly agrarian society, with vast cross-sectional variation in terms of developmental stages. As far as the comparative research on political participation is concerned, the first peculiarity poses far more numerous and serious conceptual issues and problems, although the second peculiarity can not be simply brushed aside. So I will mainly focus on the former aspect in detail below.

After we settle down on the dependent and explanatory variables of this comparative study, one of the first questions we have to ask is: "Are we looking at the same things in these countries?" First of all, as the dependent variable of this research is political participation, is it the same in Western liberal democracies and in mainland China? The defining characteristics of liberal democracies are two aspects, "an implicit bargain between the representative governments and their citizens and specific arrangement that regulates that bargain" (Powell 1992:195), or in short, representation and election. So political participation in policy making by the people is the fundamental meaning of democracy. In contrast, in mainland China's Leninist party-state system, representation and election have qualitatively different meanings, and political participation in mainland China has to adapt to this peculiar setting.

In a Leninist party-state, representation of preferences is not the basis on which the government builds its legitimacy. The defining characteristics of mainland China's political system are "guardianship, hierarchy, and mass line" (Manion 1999:19). Since according to the Leninist theory most people in the society know neither their best interests nor the historical law of development, their political participation in policy making would be both unnecessary and dangerous. Therefore, only the elite vanguard party, the Communist Party, can best lead the society. In the Chinese context, the only theoretic modification of that principle is the "mass line", which takes into consideration the "scattered and unsystematic ideas" of the masses, but whether such ideas can be reflected in public policy is solely determined by the communist party leaders (Manion 1999:20). In practice, since Deng Xiaoping's reforms started in the late 1970s, Chinese leaders have increasingly staked their legitimacy on economic performance "more than anything else" (Manion 1999:2), but this never change the fundamental claim of the party's superior knowledge. It can even be argued that the Communist Party's "pursuit of a technocratic economic growth policy" (Almond and Powell 1996:184) strengthens its guardianship in Chinese society, as the claim that economic development necessitates effective shielding of policy-making from mass preferences has wider appeal. Only last month, the Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin promulgated the "theory of 3 representations", which again emphasized the bases of the communist party's unique guardianship role in society.

As Pitkin points out, "representation has both substantive and formal components, and we need them both". As a consequence of the above fundamental difference in representation, elections, the "institutional, formal arrangements" (Pitkin 1969:22) of representation, in Western liberal democracies and in mainland China have to carry different meanings. In liberal democracies, voting in elections, despite of the fact that it's only one of the forms of citizen involvement in politics, naturally occupies the central place in democratic politics and in contemporary political science (Powell 1982:111; Franklin 1996:216). Therefore, studies of political participation in liberal democracies focus on voting, and some scholars claim that "for most Americans, voting is the only form of political participation" (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980:1). Voting in regular, competitive, and fair elections permits the rejection of candidates or officials who have offended so many voters that they cannot win an election, "even in the presence of cycles, manipulation, and other kinds of 'errors' in voting" (Riker 1982:242), thus holding government officials accountable and responsive. In contrast, voting in elections in mainland China, operating in the theoretical and institutional context of a Leninist party-state, has many peculiar features that bring very serious difficulties to cross-national comparisons with Western liberal democracies in the study of political participation. In conformity with the Leninist version of guardianship, there is no direct election of government leaders, and "all positions of real importance in China fall under the CCP's nomenklatura -- even many of those, such as the head of the National People's Congress, that are stipulated in the State Constitution as 'elected' officials" (Lieberthal 1995:209). At least two categories of elections remain, however, and they are: elections of representatives to the local people's congress and elections of work unit or village leaders. We still have to be careful in making comparisons of voting in these elections with voting in liberal democracies, although China's semi-competitive elections in these two categories have started to show encouraging signs of transforming the voting behavior of ordinary citizens and the relationship between grassroots leaders and masses (Manion 1996:745; Shi 1999:30).

Comparative studies on other forms of political participation across liberal democracies and mainland China may seem less problematic at first thought, although they are far from immune from complications. Within the framework of communist party dominance, the Chinese party-state single-handedly defines what constitutes officially acceptable and what constitutes officially unacceptable political participation (Manion 1999:48). This constraint has profound impact on individual citizen's calculation and decision on whether or what to choose from the repertories of participatory political activities (Barnes 1979:153). Some forms of political participation that are very common in liberal democracies, such as working or donating money for an opposition party, are simply invisible in mainland China to most researchers. Other forms of participation, such as protest and even political discussion, involve very different calculations of risks and benefits on the citizen's part in the mainland China political context than in the liberal democracies. Therefore, in the cross-national comparative study of political participation in Western liberal democracies and in mainland China, we have to recognize and take into consideration the different scopes and profiles of the repertories of political participation within these two different kinds of political systems, and in the interpretation of the research results, we have to bear these conceptual issues and problems in mind. In Verba, Nie, and Kim's comparative study of political participation, for example, the result that the United States and Yugoslavia had almost equal correlations (0.35 and 0.36, respectively) of the socio-economic resource level scale and the political activity scale did not constitute a reason for hasty celebration without serious consideration of the conceptual and measurement issues in these two different political systems (1978:64). Another example is personal contacting, which is a form of political participation very common in both liberal democracies and in mainland China (Franklin 1996:230; Manion 1999:59). However, personal contacting in these two political contexts can not be easily equated to each other, as it has at least two peculiar features in the Chinese setting. First, personal contacting is normally targeted at grassroots leaders, instead of government officials, as in liberal democracies. Second, personal contacting in mainland China is normally intended to influence policy implementation, not policy formulation. Therefore, comparison of the aspects of personal contacting in these two political systems has to take these conceptual differences into account.

Last but not least, political participation does not occur in a political vacuum. Basic freedoms of speech, press, assembly and organization, human social and political rights, and rule of law all have highly significant impact on political participation. Political participation without or with only partial basic human rights is conceptually different from political participation with legal or institutional guarantees of those rights. The role played by the rule of law is probably even more important. To overlook these important issues in a comparative study of political participation would cause serious problems in this cross-national project that include both Western liberal democracies and mainland China.

Now I turn to the explanatory variables. Some of the time-honored explanatory variables in the study of political participation both in liberal democracies and in authoritarian states, such as sex, age, education, and other demographic attributes, certainly involve fewer and less serious conceptual issues and problems than others. Here I will talk about two explanatory variables that have potential problems in the cross-national study of political participation, namely, associational involvement and party mobilization (although I personally would hesitate to put the latter in the "explanatory variable" category in such studies).

Involvement in social organizations has been emphasized by previous literature on political participation as a very important explanatory variable in liberal democracies (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993:80; Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995:440). In Putnam's words, "the denser such networks in a community, the more likely that its citizens will be able to cooperate for mutual benefit", (1993:173). However, even in studies of political participation within liberal democracies, conceptual problems on associational life arise, which only exacerbate if we include countries like mainland China in the study. First of all, do these associations include political ones? If not, to what extent do they really have an effect on political participation independent of the political parties? Two scholars, for example, in criticizing Putnam's negligence of political organizations in his discussion of civil associations in Italy, noted that "most of this region's sports clubs, choral societies, cooperatives, and cultural associations had been organized by and for two major political parties, the Communists and the Christian Democrats" (Foley and Edwards 1996:42). Therefore, in conducting research on the effect of associational life on political participation, we have to pay attention to the degree of independence of such organizations from political parties. In mainland China, the "mass organizations" are extensions of the Party into society, as "transmission belts" of policy implementation (Manion 1999: 60).

Mobilization by political parties in a Leninist party-state is not conceptually equivalent to party mobilization in liberal democracies. The essential features of a competitive party system operating in democratic electoral processes are reflected in the targeting and timing of their mobilization efforts: the parties are more likely to mobilize potential supporters of themselves and to leave alone those of their competing parties, during elections or at crucial periods of the policy-making stage. In contrast, a Leninist party's mobilization efforts in an environment without electoral competition with other parties are qualitatively different: targeting without considering competition parties and timing without considering electoral cycles or policy-making stages.

Given all the above conceptual issues and problems involved in the comparative study of political participation in Western liberal democracies and in mainland China, can we learn anything at all from the Western literature on political participation in our researches in mainland China? The answer is unquestionably positive. On one hand, we have to consciously keep the above issues and problems in mind and have to be aware of the limitations of application and be careful in the interpretation of the research results. On the other hand, the well-developed political science literature on Western political participation will prove to be an invaluable bonanza in our research on political participation in mainland China. Next I shall discuss to what extent and in what ways the literature on political participation in Western democracies is relevant and helpful to the study of political participation in mainland China.

First of all, at the level of research paradigm, rational choice theory provides a powerful tool to analyze individual citizen's decision to participate in politics. A rational actor who always takes the one course of action which yields him the highest utility, ceteris paribus, will participate in politics when the returns of participation outweigh its cost (Downs 1957:274). Proceeding from this research paradigm, we can set about specifying utility functions of individual citizens, engaging in the cumulative puzzle-solving "normal science" activities without having to worry too much about basic concepts and terminology (Kuhn 1996:52). Another research tradition along the same line that is highly relevant and helpful to the study of political participation in mainland China is the "theory of groups and organizations" (Olson 1971:9). If some forms of political participation can be regarded as collective actions to achieve public good, we can apply this theory to the study of political participation in mainland China. Therefore testable hypotheses can be derived, such as that "everything else being equal, people in smaller communities are more active in participating in politics than those in bigger communities".

The literature on political participation in Western liberal democracies also offers invaluable insights about the relationships among the "independent and dependent variables that form similar patterns in all or most of the countries" (Barnes et. al. 1979:21). The empirical patterns found in Western liberal democracies can be helpful in our formulation of theoretical intuitions. However, here as above mentioned, exceptional caution has to be exerted to avoid hasty transplant research designs, measurements, specifications, or results from Western literature directly into the research on political participation in mainland China. The "patterns" may be similar, but this should not prevent us from the realization that potential conceptual issues and problems are present. With that precaution in mind, if we look carefully into the literature on Western political participation and pay special attention to the part of the reasoning that are less relevant to features of liberal democracies, we will probably be able to develop some general testable hypotheses and apply that to the Chinese context.

In terms of research strategies, we can also draw invaluable lessons and examples from the political science literature on Western political participation. For example, in Wolfinger and Rosenstone's study of American farmers' voting behavior, they first made careful distinction between farmers, farm workers, farm residents, and rural residents, and second controlled for income, age, education, and other demographic variables to single out "farmer's remarkable high voting rates [that] cannot be explained by their other demographic characteristics" (1980:32). Next, they gave the possible explanations for such a puzzle. In the Chinese context, we also have to be very careful in singling out the effect of occupation from the effect of place of residence. A Chinese villager not necessarily engages in agricultural work, and an agricultural worker may not live in a village. It depends on the hypothesis to be tested whether we should use occupation or place of residence as the explanatory variable, which could become a tricky issue especially in the Chinese countryside.