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Membership Premium or Self-Selection? Communist Party Recruitment and Social Stratification in Urban China

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Abstract

Although a large literature has found the enduring income advantages of Communist Party members in post-reform socialist economies, little is known about whether these advantages are due to real membership premium or self-selectivity. Using data from the Chinese General Social Survey, our analysis based upon the Heckman two-stage approach incorporates the application process into the examination of Communist political recruitment, providing compelling evidence for the following findings. First, although education and father’s Party membership significantly improve the incentives to apply for joining the Party, they are not relevant determinants in the Party’s screening process. Second, the income gap between rejected applicants and Party members is much smaller than between non-applicants and applicants, showing that the commonly observed income premium is largely due to self-selection rather than Party membership per se. Third, the Communist Party rewards its members through the distribution of career opportunities. Our research sheds some new light on the sustainability of the Communist ruling power, by linking the political recruitment process to stratification outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Due to the data limitation, we could only obtain the information on the time of being selected, namely, joining the Party, but not on the time of application. So we choose a convenient way to exclude the respondents who joined the Party before they entered into the labor market, and then we assume that the application and selection both took place after the respondents’ first job obtainment. So we can use the highest educational credential, and first job obtainments in the model. Father’s information was based on the year when the respondents were 18.

  2. One limitation of the Heckman two-stage model is that the results are not very robust across different model specifications. So we check model specifications by estimating the probability of application and selection with two logit models separately. Although they cannot resolve the selection bias problem, they provide some clues that father’s Party membership does not matter in the selection process. We also try different model specifications for the Heckman approach: when father’s Party membership is added into the selection equation, it turns out to be insignificant. Finally, we choose the best-fitted model, as Table 2 shows, and exclude father’s Party membership in the selection process.

  3. We check the relationships using ANOVA and the results suggest so.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Statistics and Information, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Yanfeng Gu

  2. Department of Public Administration, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Bingdao Zheng

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  1. Yanfeng Gu
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  2. Bingdao Zheng
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Correspondence to Bingdao Zheng.

Additional information

Bingdao Zheng received financial support from the Ministry of Education in China (15YJC630189) and the “Chenguang Program” cosponsored by Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.

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Gu, Y., Zheng, B. Membership Premium or Self-Selection? Communist Party Recruitment and Social Stratification in Urban China. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 23, 499–518 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-018-9552-9

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