Legitimacy from Electoral Manipulation: The Mass Culture of Consensus Elections in Chinese Village Elections (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Parties, Pluralism, and Electoral Politics in Post-Communist Settings

Abstract

Autocrats often face a tradeoff between electoral manipulation and legitimacy. The tradeoff, however, is solved in Chinese village elections. Drawing on ethnographic evidence, I propose a cultural explanation. There is congruence between CCP’s practice of manipulation and the electoral perception of Chinese ordinary villagers. For villagers, legitimate elections should follow a populist approach to express the single will of the mass and exclude elite competition. Competitive elections, therefore, are illegitimate for being a playfield of self-serving elites and creating political and social divisions among the mass. By contrast, electoral manipulation by the party accords with the populist conception of elections. To control electoral outcome and preempt political instability, the party engineers the collective compliance of voters with its decision on whom to select through extensive mass work and deterring the challenge of elites. By revealing the legitimacy of electoral manipulation in rural China, the research implies the self-reinforcement of authoritarian elections as an important mechanism to sustain authoritarianism and suggests the detrimental consequences of populism for the democratization of communist or post-communist countries.

Author

• Jingping LIU, Pennsylvania State University