Political Ties and Political Participation in China - A Novel Instrument

• In Event: New Insights on the Internet and Authoritarian Rule in China

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel instrument – the political position generator - for measuring individuals’ political ties, or personal, affective connections to state officials and other political actors. Rooted in a social capital perspective, the concept of political ties goes beyond the narrower notion of patron-clientelism as a framework for understanding relationships between state and non-state actors by foregrounding the access to resources inherent in ongoing social relationships rather than explicit, temporally-limited quid pro quos. In this way, the concept of political ties resembles a longer discussion within the economic sociology and management literature on the role of private-sector executives’ personal ties to state officials in explaining differences in firms’ performance.

The political position generator adopts and adapts the more general position generator framework, which is well-established within social capital research, to capture three central, theoretically-distinct dimensions of political ties – upper reachability (access to high-ranking positions), diversity (access to a wide variety of positions), and strength of affective bonds (i.e., close family vs. distant relatives vs. friends vs. acquaintances). It thus represents an improvement over previous quantitative measures of political ties: (1) ordinal scales, which tend to be unidimensional and are difficult to interpret across individuals; and (2) name generators, which are compromised by high levels of forgetting, satisficing, and sensitivity.

The political position generator was specifically developed for the Chinese context, where the concept of political ties seems particularly salient due to the deeply hierarchical, one-party authoritarian political system and cultural notion of guanxi, or reciprocal favor exchange within social networks that are equally affective and instrumental. Indeed, previous research in China has found that political ties serve as an important resource for both personal enrichment and political participation. However, potential future adaptations for use in other cultural and political contexts where political ties are assumed to be similarly salient are also discussed.

The proposed political position generator consists of 15 items capturing individuals’ ties to officials in a variety of state organs and other politically relevant posts (e.g., Communist party officials and cadres in the public security apparatus, but also journalists and lawyers). Follow-up questions ask respondents to indicate the highest rank at which they know someone (where appropriate) as well as the strength of their tie to this person.

The political position generator is tested and validated with data from the China Internet Survey, a representative sample of the Chinese population (n = 3,144). The results are indicative of multiple scales corresponding to several unique types of political ties to more people in more liberal positions vs. officials with closer ties to the state. Significant correlations in the expected directions between the political position generator and numerous political participation, demographic, and attitudinal variables – as well as significant differences in the strength of these correlations across scales – provide proof of construct. Thus, I conclude that the political position generator represents a valuable new tool for researchers interested in how personal, affective bonds shape the dynamics of state-society relations in China and beyond, an under-researched area within political science.

Author

• Keri Hartman, Hertie School of Governance