Land Taking and Electoral Rule Setting: Evidence from Chinese Rural Democracy
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Author | Xi Zhao,Ran Tao,Xi Lu,Fubing Su |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718804827 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(3) 752 –774
Land Taking and Electoral
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718804827
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Chinese Rural Democracy
Fubing Su1, Xi Lu2, Xi Zhao3 and
Ran Tao4
Abstract
This article explains the regional variation in the electoral rules governing village election in China.
We argue that China’s fast urbanization and land development have undermined the quality of rural
democracy because local government officials faced pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and
therefore had motivation to manipulate election rules. A panel dataset covering two rounds of
elections in 2005 and 2008 is utilized to test the hypothesized relationship. Our findings are robust
to various refinements in measurement and model specification. These findings contribute to the
general literature on land and democratization as well as the recent debate about competitive
elections in authoritarian countries.
Keywords
China, land requisition, village election, democracy
Accepted: 12 September 2018
Electoral rules determine how individual preferences in a society are aggregated to form
a collective decision. By specifying who can participate in voting, how candidates are
nominated, whether voting is compulsory, and what formula is used to select winners,
these procedures set the rules of the game. Studies of electoral politics have examined the
impact of electoral rules on various aspects of democratic politics, such as the party sys-
tem, the intra-party structure, proportionality, taxation, government spending, and the
monetary policy (Austen-Smith, 2000; Persson and Tabellini, 2005). Studying voter
turnout, researchers have also found strong evidence that compulsory voting, automatic
registration, more permissive eligibility rules for absentee ballots, and more convenient
1Political Science Department, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
2Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore
3Bank of America, San Francisco, CA, USA
4School of Economics, Renmin University, Beijing, China
Corresponding author:
Ran Tao, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, PR China.
Email: rantao1972@ruc.edu.cn
Su et al.
753
voting hours increase participation (Fornos et al., 2004). These policy consequences,
however, may be the exact reason for the adoption of these rules in the first place. In their
empirical analysis of election laws in American cities, Aghion et al. (2008) discovered
that the majority of the population strategically switched from single-member districting
to multiple-member districting when the population share of the minority groups started
to increase, with the ultimate goal of minimizing minority representation in the city
governments.
This insight calls for a more nuanced analysis of electoral rules. Assessing the impacts
of these institutions aside, scholars should put equal emphasis on the underlying politics
of setting rules in the real world. In the study of Chinese village democracy, researchers
have established the empirical connection between village election and public goods pro-
vision, income equality, and villagers’ political attitudes (Landry et al., 2010; Li, 2003).
What is missing is a good understanding of the electoral rules governing village elections.
Based on extensive fieldworks, we know that villages have relied on different formulas to
elect their leaders. While some rules are more transparent, others leave a lot of room for
manipulation. How variant are these local practices? Why do villages follow different
rules? This article seeks to fill in this gap by first mapping out regional variations and then
offering an explanation that is based on the political incentive of the rule setters.
The Villagers’ Committees (VCs) are by law autonomous organizations, but town-
ship officials are in charge of setting the rules for the elections. Under China’s cadre
management system, the career advancement of these grassroots officials depends on
their ability to accomplish key tasks assigned from their superiors. Since the late 1990s,
one major task has been land requisition. Local governments raced against each other
to attract manufacturing jobs and engineered urban development. Both strategies
assumed secure access to large amounts of cheap land from the countryside. This heavy
burden fell on the shoulder of township officials.1They preferred more compliant vil-
lage cadres who prioritized the government interests during the land requisition pro-
cess. Officials in the localities where more intensive land development was taking place
faced more pressure to ensure “right” cadres elected, and therefore had stronger moti-
vation to adopt rules that gave them more control. We analyze data from two large
national surveys of 120 villages in 2005 and 2008 and empirically confirm the connec-
tion between land taking and the quality of election rules. Since our data followed the
same villages in two rounds of elections, we took advantage of this unique panel data
to test our theory.
Our research makes a number of theoretical contributions. Scholars have documented
similar political dynamics in Germany (Kreuzer, 2005). Politicians manipulated electoral
formulas to secure their power and dominance. The Chinese case extends the scope
beyond mature democracies. Because the Chinese village democracy is orchestrated by a
one-party state, there are also meaningful differences. In mature democracies, politicians
or parties may opt for one electoral rule over the other. These rules may have distribu-
tional consequences for different parties and groups in the society, but they will not fun-
damentally change the democratic nature of the state. The Chinese state is still
experimenting with village democracy under a one-party rule. In their effort to assert state
control, local officials are willing to introduce rules that undermine a true village democ-
racy. This type of rule-bending in China sounds egregious, but it follows very much the
same logic found in mature democracies. In extending the political incentive-based
explanation of electoral rules to transitional regimes, researchers are likely to identify
more cases close to the Chinese scenario.
754
Political Studies 67(3)
Our findings about the impact of land on democratic politics also resonate with cases
from other parts of the world. Moore (1966) has analyzed how the landed upper class
suppressed the bourgeoisie in Germany while their ultimate destruction and assimilation
into the new capitalist class in England and France paved the road to parliamentary
democracies. Likewise, before the introduction of secret balloting in 1958, Chilean local
elections were dominated by large landowners. Landlords used contracts as leverages and
coerced peasants to vote for landowners’ preferred policies (Baland and Robinson, 2008).
Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) offer a generalized theory of land in democratic transi-
tion and consolidation. Compared with capital, land is less conducive to democracy
mainly for two reasons: inelastic supply and vulnerability to revolutionary disruptions.
Land in rural China has played a similar role of distorting democracy but the underlying
mechanism is different. In other countries, land was directly controlled by private prop-
erty owners. Seeing democracy as a redistributive mechanism, landlords fought hard to
preserve their wealth, thus manipulating elections or simply shunning democratic institu-
tions. In China, rural land is owned by village collectives. So the contention has devel-
oped between the state and the villages, not along the more conventional line of social
classes within rural communities. Local governments were afraid that true democracy
would empower rural residents to reclaim their rightful interest in the process of industri-
alization and urbanization. Despite this institutional difference, the underlying logic is
consistent in all these cases.
Tying the previous two discussions together, our article can shed some light on the
large debate about economic development and democratization. It is generally believed
that industrialization and urbanization increase the size of the middle class and raise the
educational level of the citizenry, which lay down the foundation for democratic politics
(Lipset, 1959). Recent scholarship, however, started to question the empirical support for
this argument. Przeworski and Limongi (1997) discovered that rising income stopped
increasing the likelihood of democratic transition once a certain threshold of GDP per
capita was reached. Acemoglu et al. (2008) relied on more sophisticated econometric
models and found that the empirical correlation between high income and democracy was
really driven by some omitted variables.
Our analysis of rural democracy in China lends more credibility to these cross-country
statistical studies. The introduction of village democracy in the mid-1980s was not a
grassroots movement envisioned by the modernization theory, because the countryside
happened to be the least developed. Moreover, in their quest for economic growth, local
governments realized that village democracy inhibited their ability of taking land from
farmers. From the state’s perspective, economic...
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