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Legislator Attributes and Advocacy Focus: Non-electoral Sources of Parochialism in an Indirectly-Elected Legislature

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Abstract

What explains the differences between legislators’ orientation toward parochialism? While much literature exists on the effect of electoral rules on legislators’ focus on parochial interests in democratic legislatures, less is known about party-nominated and indirectly elected legislators. Drawn on interviews and an original dataset of congressional opinions in China, this analysis identifies non-electoral sources of pork barrel politics. It finds evidence of some orientation toward parochialism among indirectly elected provincial legislators in China. In particular, provincial legislators who concurrently work in lower-level political positions are more inclined to favor constituency-centered interests over broader public interests than non-official legislators. After ruling out several important alternative mechanisms, I argue that extra-legislative incentives and resources to solve local policy problems are the likely mechanisms that connect legislators’ occupation attributes with their advocacy focus. These findings have implications for the role of legislator attributes and the function of non-popularly elected legislatures.

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Fig. 1

Source: author’s dataset

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Notes

  1. Eleven percent of all dictatorships throughout 1946–2008 have unelected or appointed national legislatures (Svolik 2012, 36). In China, there are nearly 3000 national legislators, over 11,000 provincial legislators, and 118,000 prefectural legislators (Manion 2015, 32), all of whom are not elected through popular votes.

  2. These theoretical frameworks highlight the role of authoritarian congresses in sustaining regime longevity, including co-opting (potential) opposition by making policy concessions (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007), by sharing rents (Truex 2014), and by mitigating commitment problems in power sharing (Magaloni 2008). Ruling elites in non-democracies also use the legislature to collect information on public demands (Manion 2015; O’Brien 1994) and quality of subordinates (Geddes 2006) and to provide information for the bureaucracy that could be incorporated into future policy (Hough and Fainsod 1979; Schuler 2020).

  3. Legislators in China are almost entirely part time. In Vietnam, the number of full-time legislators has expanded to 30% since 2000 (Malesky and Schuler 2010, 489).

  4. These positions include positions in the Chinese Communist Party departments, government bureaus, and congress committees.

  5. Almost all Chinese legislators are part-time.

  6. Interview AH21001, Interview GD19001, Interview GD20001, Interview YN21002.

  7. See, for example, a 1988 regulation acquired during fieldwork, “Regulations of Shanghai Municipal Congress on Legislator Opinions” (shanghaishi renmin daibiao dahui guanyu daibiao jianyi piping he yijian de guiding). Based on the interview (Interview SH19001), if any delegate violates the regulation, congress staffs would send the opinion back to the delegate and ask her to rewrite and resubmit. Congress staffs would also inform the delegate of the regulation that prohibits submitting opinions directly related to the interests of delegates’ relatives, friends and workplaces. It is possible that officials’ opinions that aim to solve thorny policy-related problems are implicitly related to their workplace interests; however, because they are explicitly framed as advocating public interests for a specific geographic unit, they are considered as legitimate and acceptable.

  8. The director of the personnel and deputy affairs congress committee commented: “we serve the legislators to help improve the quality of congressional opinions. If they, mostly non-official legislators, need any help (information) before raising opinions, we set up the platform (dajian pingtai), contact the government departments they want to visit, and organize investigation tours for them to gather information… These tours often span districts (i.e., prefectural-level units), we can contact different districts for legislators to have a more comprehensive understanding of the issue.” (Interview SH19001).

  9. Military also constitutes an electoral unit. The local administrative levels in China include provincial, prefectural, county, and township levels.

  10. According to Shi and Liu (2004, 275–298), out of the 82 electoral units (prefectural congresses) of Shanxi, Sichuan, and Zhejiang provincial congresses, the number of legislator candidates nominated by local party branches is equal to the number of seats in 80 electoral units; on average, over 90% of party nominees are elected to Guangdong, Shanxi, and Sichuan provincial congresses. Sun (2014) also finds that in indirect elections, almost every elected legislator is organization nominated.

  11. Around 40–60% of Vietnam National Assembly legislators (1992–2007) work in government and party departments (Malesky and Schuler 2010, 487). Forty-four percent of the 11th Chinese National People’s Congress legislators are government/party employees (Truex 2016,110). See also, http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2013/0228/c1001-20623877.html, accessed in Nov. 2019. In Chinese provincial congresses, the proportion of official legislators varies from 27 to 49% (see Table 4 in Appendix).

  12. Shanghai has the largest group of entrepreneur legislators (36%), especially SOE managers, while Anhui and Fujian provincial congresses have the largest number of private entrepreneur legislators (over 20%). Yet, entrepreneur legislators account for less than 10% in Yunnan.

  13. http://www.spcsc.sh.cn/Attach/Attaches/201308/201308280315394754.pdf, accessed in July 2019.

  14. These are based on articles 18 and 20 in the 2015 Law on Congress Legislators.

  15. This is consistent with the finding that the level of localism is the lowest among provincial legislators in Shanghai. Only 17% of legislator opinions are local in Shanghai (see Table 2).

  16. http://jyfw.bjrd.gov.cn/publicProposal/getProposalInfo.shtml?proposalId=188140, http://db.ynrd.gov.cn:9107/rdsuggestion/suggestiondetail.shtml?orgId=1&suggestionId=be36b82eaa344a418a9865b52dae1c5f, http://db.ynrd.gov.cn:9107/rdsuggestion/suggestiondetail.shtml?orgId=1&suggestionId=da6c97f53379413dba957ef48e77891a, http://jyfw.bjrd.gov.cn/publicProposal/getProposalInfo.shtml?proposalId=212114, accessed in Nov 2019.

  17. Not all opinions have been put online and some sensitive ones were left unpublished. Interviewees in Shanghai and Anhui provinces mentioned that over 90% of opinions have been released on their congress websites (InterviewSH18001, InterviewAH19001). Tianjin congress, a provincial-level municipality congress, is dropped from the sample due to an exceptionally low number of available opinions (i.e., 194 opinions for the 16th Tianjin congress) compared to other provincial-level units and thus a concern for selection bias.

  18. The percentage of local questions in parliamentary questions is 39.3% and 44.1% in Italy and Ireland, respectively (Martin 2011, 478; Russo 2011, 293).

  19. Public organizations include party and government departments, congress committees, public institutions such as hospitals and universities, and united frontline organizations including satellite parties, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (zhengxie), and mass organizations(quntuan zuzhi).

  20. Reply documents in D province were acquired during fieldwork in D province in 2019.

  21. The case of Shanghai is somewhat unique in the way that it remains the only province (out of the sampled six provinces) outrightly prohibiting promoting work-place interests in legislators’ opinions. The innovation mentioned above in Shanghai is neither observed in other provinces. Therefore, the pattern uncovered in this article shall have some external validity and persistency.

  22. See http://cpc.people.com.cn/18/n/2012/1109/c350825-19535943.html, accessed July 2020.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions for the revision of this article. I thank Melanie Manion, Shane Martin, Junzhi He, Chuanmin Chen, and Xiangyu Li for their comments and insights on this paper. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2019 American Political Science Association annual conference. I also thank Liting Pan, Linchuan Zhang, Jingyan Fei, and Guangyao Deng for their research assistantship on this project. All errors remain my own.

Funding

Sponsored by MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (Project No. 17YJCZH278).

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  1. School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Room 737, Wenke Building, Handan Road 220, Yangpu, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, 200433

    Cai (Vera) Zuo

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Zuo, C.(. Legislator Attributes and Advocacy Focus: Non-electoral Sources of Parochialism in an Indirectly-Elected Legislature. St Comp Int Dev 57, 433–474 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-022-09373-w

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