Why Do People Vote in Semicompetitive Elections in China?

Abstract

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the post-Mao electoral reforms was semicompetitive elections, including those for local people's congresses. A better understanding of voters' subjective motivations in these elections is critical for explaining and predicting the significant effects of the elections on sociopolitical development in rapidly changing Chinese society. Using survey data collected in Beijing, China, in 1995, we reexamine arguments and findings about voters' subjective motivations reported by Shi (1999a). Contrary to Shi's arguments and findings, we find that people with stronger democratic orientation and a keener sense of internal efficacy are less likely to vote in these semicompetitive elections, while those who are identified with the regime and have affective attachments to the political authority are more likely to vote in the elections. In this article, we present the differences between our arguments and findings and Shi's. Then we draw some important political and theoretical implications from these differences.In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Deng Xiaoping amended the electoral law for the election of people's congresses-Chinese "legislatures"-at various levels. Specifically, the new law introduced direct elections for local people's congresses. 1 According to this law, in theory voters could nominate candidates and have a choice among multiple candidates for each contested seat. Under the new law, these local elections have certainly become more competitive and transparent than those in the Mao era, but they are by no means fully competitive and democratic by any standard. These elections are still dominated and controlled by the CCP, which firmly upholds the one-party rule and allows only one official ideology (see e.g.

Neither Transgressive Nor Contained: Boundary-Spanning Contention In China

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China's Age Cohorts: Differences in Political Attitudes and Behavior*

“…In China, voting is encouraged by the state and is seen as state‐supporting activity. Hence, nonvoting could be interpreted as anti‐regime behavior, if only of a “soft” variety (see Landry, Davis, and Wang, ; Zhong and Chen, ; Chen and Zhong, ; Gandhi and Lust‐Okar, ). The finding of a big bounce between youngest group and other groups, with the older groups all being quite similar, may indicate both the greater willingness of the youngest to defy the state than the unwillingness of any of the other groups (including the oldest) to do so…”

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“…Because the election and functions of the local people's congress are limited, however, most people in China are not motivated to vote. 41 Voters in China can choose not to participate in the election of their local people's congress without being punished, although the Chinese government usually pressures people to vote in this nominal election. Table 10 shows that only 5 percent of the Chinese Christians in my study voted in the last election of their local people's congress, a figure much lower than that found in southern rural Jiangsu province and Beijing.…”