To Compete or to Cooperate HOK-WUI WONG, STAN; OR, NICK H. K.
Communist and post-communist studies,
12/2020, Letnik:
53, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a multiparty authoritarian election, candidates of the ruling coalition may cooperate with each other to defeat the opposition. Alternatively, they may compete against each other, as their support ...bases often overlap. To what extent would they compete or cooperate? Using disaggregate election data from Hong Kong, we conduct a systematic analysis of the intra-elite dynamics in elections. We find that the ruling coalition in Hong Kong has strived to suppress intra-camp competition in order to optimize nominations and vote division. We also find, however, that proestablishment parties increasingly guard against each other, which makes within-camp, cross-party coordination more difficult.
Political selection in China has received increasing scholarly attention. Conventional measures of political promotion may suffer measurement error because of an (implicit) assumption that the chance ...of cadre promotion is constant across government and party units after controlling for their hierarchical rank. In this article, the validity of this assumption is tested. Based on the analysis of the biographical data of thousands of provincial bureau leaders, a strong agency effect is identified; leaders coming from politically important bureaus-defined by their connections to the Central Committee of the ruling party-stand a significantly higher chance of promotion than those coming from the less important ones. Incorporating the agency effect, the authors develop a continuous measure of political turnover. Using this refined measure, the authors revisit the effect of economic performance on provincial cadre promotion. While a positive relationship is found, the effect is arguably too small to be substantively significant.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the mid-2000s, Beijing made a series of unilateral trade concessions with respect to agricultural trade with Taiwan. This move distressed the then incumbent party of the Republic of China, the ...Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), because Beijing's offers might weaken the DPP's rural support. This article offers the first empirical assessment of Beijing's trade concessions. Using an original and highly disaggregate dataset at the township-product level, it examines what types of regions were more likely to be the beneficiary of the trade concessions, whether the concessions caused any production change, and the extent to which these changes undermined the DPP's electoral support. It is found that while the benefit of tariff concession was not confined to pro-DPP regions, the townships that grew tariff-reduced products were no less likely to vote for the DPP. The result suggests a limit of Beijing's economic enticement.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Localist parties have become an emerging force in Hong Kong's political landscape. What has caused the rise of localism in the city? Extant studies focus on cultural and social factors. In this ...article, we propose a political economy explanation: global and regional economic factors have caused a housing boom in Hong Kong since the mid-2000s and produced impactful redistributive consequences. While homeowners benefit tremendously from the hike in asset prices, non-homeowners stand to lose. Their divergent economic interests then translate into political preferences; homeowners support political parties that favour the status quo, while non-homeowners tend to support those that challenge it. Using a newly available public opinion survey, we find preliminary evidence in support of our argument. In particular, homeowners are less likely to identify with localist parties and tend to vote for pro-establishment ones. High-income earners, however, are more likely to vote for localist parties.
Candidate appearance is a significant predictor of election outcomes in democracies because voters often make inference of competence based on facial appearance. Do inferences of competence from ...faces matter in autocracies? In this article, we study the effects of candidate appearance on the selection of three types of Chinese officials: (1) rural deputies elected to a local people's congress (LPC), (2) urban deputies elected to the LPC, and (3) unelected mayors and bureaucrats. We find that facial competence cues are relevant only to the votes received by rural LPC candidates. Our findings suggest the importance of information accessibility in political selection. In particular, the “selectorate” of mayors and bureaucrats do not need facial appearance cues because they have access to substantive information about the quality of political candidates. Our findings provide a possible explanation for the resilience of some autocracies: they are able to identify talent through an informative, albeit non-electoral, selection mechanism.
Much research has been done to study how competitive elections affect autocracies and their opposition. Electoral institutions, however, may have different social and political effects. In this ...paper, I examine the effect of an understudied electoral institution: lower-level elections. I argue that elections at grassroots levels tend to favor the ruling party by allowing it to more fully utilize its resource advantage to buy political support, which would in turn undermine the opposition's ability to develop a local support network that is important to its struggle for democratization as well as for elected offices. Evaluating the effect of lower-level elections is empirically challenging because the effect is likely to be confounded with voter preference. I tackle this identification problem by taking advantage of a quasi-experiment afforded by the electoral formula of Hong Kong, which allows me to use a regression discontinuity design to test my causal argument. I find strong statistical evidence supporting my argument; the ruling elite's aggressive expansion in the District Councils, the lowest elected tier, aims to drive out the opposition elites, who, by occupying a District Council seat, are able to increase their vote share of that constituency by 4–5 percentage points in a subsequent legislative election.
•Grassroots elections help authoritarian regimes weaken opposition parties.•This is because grassroots elections maximize the ruling party's resource advantage.•I apply a regression discontinuity design to study multi-level elections in Hong Kong.•The ruling parties have effectively weakened the opposition with low-level elections.
Migration to electoral autocracies has become increasingly common. Extant studies, however, accord little attention to the immigrants' influences on the domestic politics of these regimes. We argue ...that immigrants have attributes (status quo bias and lack of prior exposure to local politics) that make them an attractive co-optation target of the authoritarian regime. We provide a case study of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong to illustrate our argument. Since the sovereignty transfer, the Hong Kong government has devised various schemes to attract these immigrants, while pro-establishment political parties and groups have actively sought to co-opt them. Using two distinct public opinion surveys, we also find that immigrants are more likely to approve of the political and economic status quo, and less likely to vote for pro-democracy opposition parties than the natives. In addition, we find no evidence that exposure to political information can change the immigrants' vote choice.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The resilience of non-democratic regimes in the past decades demonstrates that some authoritarian regimes have figured out ways to consolidate regime support without democratic elections. Hong Kong ...is a remarkable case of “legitimacy without democracy” as the system of government enjoyed a certain level of legitimacy since colonial days without being democratically elected. Using Hong Kong as a case and based on data from several waves of Asian Barometer Survey (ABS), this study analyzes the impact of citizens’ evaluation of the economic conditions, perception of freedoms, perceived procedural justice and institutional trust, and stability concerns on diffuse regime support in Hong Kong. There are three key findings of this study. First, economic performance is not a significant predictor of diffuse regime support in the case of Hong Kong, whereas, second, institutional trust and perceived civil liberties are. Finally, we found indirect evidence for the role of stability in shaping regime support, although its importance seems far less important than institutional trust and civil liberties.
In his seminal book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Hirschman suggests that loyal members are less likely to exit when dissatisfied with the performance of the organization. In the context of a political ...regime, however, we argue that loyalty may actually encourage exit because loyal members are more sensitive to the performance decline of the regime. Using an original survey conducted in Hong Kong, we show that survey respondents with a stronger local identity have greater migration intentions. We also find that the heterogeneity of perceived political changes plays a significant role as a mediator. We discuss the political implications for Hong Kong.
Business interests have been overrepresented in key political institutions of postcolonial Hong Kong. An increasingly popular view holds that business interests, spearheaded by the real estate elite, ...have become politically powerful enough as to capture the government. In this article, I critically examine this thesis. I find that a number of high-profile mega projects considered manifestations of the so-called real estate hegemony actually met resistance from within the real estate elite, while cases where the real estate elite jointly promoted their sector interests have yielded distributive benefits to the low-income class. My findings qualify the ＂real estate hegemony＂ thesis by unraveling (1) collective action problems confronted by the special interest group and (2) positive externalities generated from special interest politics, and their political consequences.
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