Paint-by-Numbers Democracy: The Stakes, Structure, and Results of the 2007 Vietnamese National Assembly Election

Abstract

The 2007 National Assembly (NA) election in Vietnam inspired the imagination of observers. New electoral procedures boded well for increased competition and representation. This article probes this outcome, providing a detailed account of how the Vietnamese electoral process works in practice. It concludes that despite well-publicized institutional changes, the composition of the post-election NA still reflects a preplanned script and even possesses slightly smaller shares of non-party members and self-nominated candidates than in previous years. Nevertheless, the authors found some room for optimism in the unprecedented rejection of central nominees, primarily in wealthy, donor provinces.

Star Search: Do Elections Help Nondemocratic Regimes Identify New Leaders?

“…This finding supports evidence from interviews conducted for previous work (Malesky and Schuler 2009) that suggests officials from the aNA actually contact potential leaders for the VNA prior to nominating them for office. These delegates are also usually nominated at the central level, which our results confirm.…”

“…Second, among the 156 central nominees, evidence from other work shows that the Vietnamese regime tends to engage in some preelectoral institutional manipulation, allowing it to secure victory by wide margins for its preferred candidates. Malesky and Schuler (2011) show that the regime relied on two key mechanisms to ensure larger margins of victory for preferred candidates.…”

“…12 The second method was to place candidates in districts with weaker competition. Malesky and Schuler (2011) developed a metric to estimate the difficulty of the district by creating an additive index, wherein each candidate of the district was given a point if he or she was a member of the Politburo, a member of the Central Committee, a Provincial People's Committee chairman, a member of the People's Council, or a central nominee. A candidate's electoral difficulty was the sum of the power rankings of the other candidates in the district.…”

“…This mechanism may apply, because not only do voters have some choice over candidates in the election, but at least hypothetically they are also involved in the nomination process. The Vietnamese vetting process is explained in detail elsewhere (Koh 2006;Malesky and Schuler 2009), but in brief the process entails three "negotiations," which are essentially meetings arranged by the Fatherland Front? and the central and provincial election boards to set terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.…”

“…Thayer (2010) suggests that increased competition is a response to domestic critics who challenge the legitimacy of singleparty rule. Other work has examined the extent to which the VCP may use elections to gain information about the popularity and competence of local cadres (Malesky and Schuler 2009) and whether they use elections to co-opt potential opposition (Malesky and Schuler 2011). Finally, Salomon (2007) argues that VNA elections serve as "popularity contests," where citizens can punish venal cadres and identify potential rising stars.…”