Authoritarian Representation: Military Deputies at China's National People’s Congress

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 05. Political Sociology of China

Abstract

Why do non-democratic regimes establish nominally democratic institutions? Political and social scientists have identified several reasons including legitimation, signaling, information-collection, cooptation, and policy-implementation. In this research, I study the case of the National People’s Congress (NPC) of China. My goal is to understand the functions of the NPC and how it contributes to the resilience of the Chinese regime. I focus on one particular delegation, the military delegation, and its behaviors of representation. How do military deputies perform ones’ deputyship? Does their deputyship merely legitimize the authoritarian rule? Or does it signal the strength of the regime? Do they have any agency at the NPC and therefore use this institutional platform to advance policy agendas of their constituency, the military?
I use the research design of computational grounded theory. In the first step, pattern detection step, I use the technique of topic modeling to identify to top topics in the first dataset, a corpus composed of 6,000 public comments by military deputies at NPC sessions from 2001 to 2017. In the second step, pattern refinement step, I do a qualitative deep reading based on the topic-model to identify significant themes from the topics. In the third step, I introduce the second dataset of 142 pieces of bills sponsored by military deputies in 2001-2017. I categorize these bills to identify policy issues that were consistently pushed by military deputies.
In a preliminary analysis, I use a 35-topic model to analyze to military deputies’ comments and find evidence to support the functions of strength-singling and information-collection. I do not see the discourse of representing Chinese people in the 35-topic model. Through the analysis of military deputies-sponsored bills, I identify seven policy issues raised by military deputies across three five-year NPC terms, which supports the function of policymaking of the NPC.

Author

• Zhifan Luo, State University of New York-Albany