Yes, Standing Committee: Majority Rule in Non-Democracies

Speaker: Haokun Sun, PhD candidate, Cornell University; IvyPlus Exchange Scholar, Doerr School of Sustainability

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espouses a principle of collective leadership, in which the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) makes important decisions by consensus. However, it is not known whether such a majority rule is employed in practice. This paper studies the appointment of party cadres into positions of power as a means of uncovering a general decision-making mechanism within the CCP. We provide reduced-form results showing that appointments are decided by the PSC, who selectively promote candidates in their social networks. This motivates a novel model of collective leadership in which PSC members play a coalition game to promote their preferred candidates. The majority rule is represented by a minimum constraint on the size of winning coalitions. Estimating our model, we show that appointments to positions above the vice-provincial minister level requires support from 75\% of the PSC members on average. This cut-off varies depending on the President in power, ranging from 50\% under Deng to 80\% under Jiang and Hu. Estimating political factions using modularity clustering, we find that factional penalties operate in parallel to the majority rule. Our method can be useful for understanding decision-making in non-democracies more generally.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Workshops are held on select Fridays from 12 - 1 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.