Long Live Nepotism

• In Event: Elite Dynamics and Social and Political Control in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the decline of monarchy and the rise of one-party regimes worldwide. Is the nepotistic mode of authoritarian rule obsolete? The textbook answer appears to be “yes” (Burling 1974; Huntington 1968). Over the past two decades, political scientists have further reached the consensus that democratic institutions serve as the modern foundation for authoritarian elite power-sharing and regime resiliency (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Geddes 1999; Magaloni 2008; Svolik 2012). This paper challenges the conventional belief. It argues that nepotism is not merely a corrupt system of political appointment; it is the foundation of nondemocratic ruler-elite power sharing.

Our theory is inspired by the fact that the most durable form of ruler-elite power-sharing in human history has nothing to do with modern political institutions. In almost every traditional kingdom, power is shared by royal and noble families, each of which has its own hereditary privileges. Blood-based nepotism (or dynasticism) creates an intergenerationally stable ruler-elite coalition, albeit at the expense of vertical mobility, whereas any institution or norm (e.g., nonblood-based nepotism or factionalism) that provides an upward promotion path for lower-ranking elites would exacerbate intergenerational instability at the top of the power hierarchy. A tension exists at the top of the power hierarchy---while rulers tend to prefer dynasticism, which ensures the privileges of ruler families, elites tend to prefer factionalism, which offers an upward path of promotion to elite families.

This theoretical insight is also applicable to a one-party regime, with national and regional political families (or simply rulers and elites) resemble the modern counterparts of royals and nobility.

The possibility of testing our theory faces two difficulties. First, we must find a way to consistently measure political elite family status nationwide, and subsequently we must find a way to demonstrate that hereditary power is territorial in the sense that both national and regional elites have their own hereditary privileges. Second, we must find a way to identify the tension between national and regional elites over blood- and nonblood-based nepotism with regard to appointments to top political offices. Both difficulties exist because modern autocracies actively conceal such information to make their regimes appear more inclusive and cohesive than they may actually be.

We focus on the Chinese setting to overcome these difficulties. First, this paper proposes to identify political family status by reference to given names. The Chinese revolutionary elites initiated a distinctive fashion of baby names, which we call “red names” in this paper, at approximately the time when the People's Republic was established in 1949. Red names convey patriotic, revolutionary, or progressive connotations, whereas conventional names are imbued with Confucian values. In the early 1950s, red names were relatively rare in the population. We use the Wordscores method to construct a redscore to measure the elite family status of any Chinese person born from 1945 to 1955. Using Zhang's (2019) database and various other supportive data sources, we demonstrate that the redscore is a valid measure for our purpose.

Second, we identify the tension between blood- and nonblood-based forms of nepotism by exploiting the within-subject quasi-experimental setting of the election of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) Central Committee members. A Central Committee member is first nominated by CCP leaders and then electorally approved by Party Congress delegates from across the country. Nomination decisions concerning a particular candidate reflect the nepotistic preferences of the rulers, whereas votes for the same candidate reflect the (possibly opposing) nepotistic preferences of lower-ranking regional elites.

Our findings support our theoretical predictions. We first discover that red names are associated with strong political privileges---in the sense that they are extremely overrepresented among prefecture and national leaders---in the period of our study. The identified privilege of red names peaked for birth cohorts in the middle of the 1950s and instantly vanished thereafter, whereas red names continued to increase in the population due to the copycat phenomenon until the beginning of systematic economic reforms in the early 1980s. This finding shows that the red name privilege is driven by authentic political families but not by ordinary families copying red names.

Furthermore, we highlight the tension between blood- and nonblood-based nepotism. We find that party leaders favor princeling Central Committee candidates and candidates with factional ties to top leaders during the nomination stage, whereas delegates to the National Congress display unusually strong animosity toward princelings during the election stage.

Author

• Tao Li, University of Macau