Historical Political Economy of China: New Research Frontiers

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Abstract

Historical Political Economy (HPE), an emerging interdisciplinary field in the social sciences which draws insights from history, political science and economics, has received growing scholarly attention recently. Studies in HPE typically employ quantitative methodological approaches to achieve three main goals: understanding the causal mechanisms underpinning significant political and economic events in history; examining how past political and economic institutions have shaped present outcomes; and testing social science theories using historical data. Methodologically, HPE has evolved in parallel with the "credibility revolution" in social sciences, which leverages various design-based causal inference methods to enhance the internal validity of empirical findings. In terms of data collection, this new wave of historical research often involves constructing original datasets from archives, maps, and other types of historical records, facilitated by technological advancements such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. With respect to theory building, many HPE studies articulate their arguments with formal, game-theoretic models for theoretical clarity and tractability.

However, HPE researches also face many practical and analytical challenges. Working with historical data can be challenging, due to the problems of missing data, selection bias, time decay, confirmation bias, and lack of contextual knowledge. Moreover, theory building in HPE also poses challenges due to the obstacles in extracting underlying mechanisms from historical events, as well as the difficulties of establishing causal uniqueness and causal generalization in theoretical models. Our proposed panel will feature three papers in HPE, aimed to advance the scholarship in the field by addressing these challenges. The shared regional focus of these papers is China, which has drawn considerable interest from HPE scholars recently, due to its long trajectory of political and economic development, and its well-preserved historical records.

The first paper in our proposed panel empirically examines the guardianship dilemma - an important hypothesis in authoritarian politics, by investigating the consequences of a major military reform in the Tang Dynasty of Imperial China, which systematically weakened the generals’ control over the military. Utilizing archival and archaeological data, Wang and Chen identify the causal effects that the reform both reduced generals’ rebellions against the Tang regime and increased the incidence of peasant uprisings against the regime. The second paper delves into the political successions in imperial China, exploring the inherent commitment problem in the power-sharing arrangement between the regents and the child emperors, which created political instability. Li, Lei and Chen argue that appointing female empress dowagers as the regents helped alleviate the commitment problem, and find empirical support for their claim based on an original dataset of child emperors in Imperial China. The third paper develops a formal theory to elucidate the roles of meritocratic institutions in historical political development. Yang, Huang and Li argue that the adoption of meritocratic institutions in certain historical regimes, like the Civil Service Examination (CSE) system in Imperial China, improved political stability by reducing the political mismatch between de facto power and de jure institutions. Nevertheless, such meritocratic institutions also led to the consolidation of monarchs’ power, which resulted in a “meritocratic absolutism” equilibrium in Imperial China and some other historical regimes. This is in stark contrast to the “parliamentary power-sharing” equilibrium that arose in Western Europe.

Collectively, these papers exemplify how newly available data and quantitative methodologies can enhance our understanding of China’s historical trajectory of political development. Moreover, they also shed lights on broader research agendas and debates in comparative politics and political economy – the guardianship dilemma, the political succession problem in autocracies, and the Great Political Divergence. Furthermore, each paper provides a distinct yet interconnected perspective on addressing the practical and analytical challenges in HPE researches. This panel is poised to spark in-depth discussions in this direction.

Participants in this panel bring a high level of diversity, representing various disciplines (political science, economics, and international studies) and geographic regions (North America and Asia). The panel features gender and institutional diversity and a mix of scholars at different stages in their academic careers.

Our plan is for an organized panel, with papers or slides pre-circulated and made available to all attendees. We expect participants to have read the papers in advance, and a significant portion of the panel's time will be devoted to discussions and intellectual exchanges. We expect this panel to attract a wide range of scholars from political science and related disciplines, including history, economics, and regional studies. The panel's participants have organized sessions on Chinese politics, economics, and historical political economy at numerous conferences in the recent years, and the turnouts for these panels have been consistently high.

Sub Unit

• General Paper and Panel Submissions

Individual Presentations

• How (Not) to Solve the Guardianship Dilemma: Institutional Counterbalancing and the Consequences of Military Control in Medieval China - Erik H Wang, New York University; Joy Chen, Renmin University of China

• Matriarch for the Patriarch: Female Regency and Political Stability in Historical Regimes - Zhenhuan Lei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Xiuyu Li, New York University; Joy Chen, Renmin University of China

• Meritocracy in Historical Political Development - Zhaomin Li, University of Washington; Clair Yang, University of Washington; Yasheng Huang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chair

• Zhaomin Li University of Washington

Discussants

• Clair Yang University of Washington

• Erik H Wang New York University