The Logic of Authoritarian Political Selection: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in China

Abstract

Political selection is important to authoritarian regime survival. Although selection outcomes are often observed, it is difficult to decipher elites’ logic of decision-making due to their multidimensional preference and the opaque process. Employing a conjoint experiment conducted among over 300 government officials in China, this paper unpacks multidimensional elite preference in entry-level political selection. It finds that while elites comply with institutional norms by selecting candidates based on competence and loyalty, they also take into account personal preference by favoring those with political connections. Kinship ties to government increase a candidate’s chance by over 20 percentage points, even though the candidate is not deemed more competent or loyal. These findings demonstrate that authoritarian elites do not always follow the logic of regime survival; there exists an agency problem in political selection that could undermine the effectiveness of the ruling class over time.

University Elections and Political Socialization in the Developing World

“…OLS estimates from a regression of respondents' binary candidate preference on a set of categorical variables representing each candidate attribute will produce an unbiased estimate of the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE) for each attribute-level (Hainmueller et al 2014;Horiuchi et al 2018). Conjoint analysis has been employed in a number of studies where the attribute of interest is difficult to understand a uni-dimensional survey question, usually because respondents hesitate to openly admit holding certain preferences regarding the religious, racial, ethnic, or political affiliation of the profile they are evaluating (Hainmueller et al 2014;Auerbach & Thachil 2018;Liu 2018). Conjoint experiments help overcome systematic measurement error produced by preference falsification by embedding an evaluation of side-by-side profiles in which the respondent is only asked to evaluate the candidate profile rather than the sensitive attribute itself.…”

Pathways to Power in Authoritarian Regimes: Civil Service, Multipartyism and Legislative Selection in Cameroon

“…Elites might be expected to marshal basic competencies in terms of legislative process and knowledge of government, especially as legislatures become more professionalized. Ruling parties might enforce these criteria during the selection process by requiring minimal levels of education (Liu 2018). By contrast, work on African legislatures suggests historically low levels of professionalization and a premium placed on constituency service (Mattes and Mozaffar 2016).…”

“…In Tanzania, Keith Weghorst has shown how the ruling party uses records of partisan activism as a barometer along which to evaluate potential legislators (Weghorst Forthcoming). Similarly, the Chinese Communist Party uses institutionalized recruitment mechanisms to limit selection to supporters who are clearly ‘red and expert’ (Liu 2018).…”

“…First, civil servants are often high-quality candidates (Branedle and Stutzer 2016). Recruits into the civil service usually must satisfy basic educational requirements, take entry exams or provide personal references (Liu 2018). Certain positions require recruits to possess specific technical skills and advanced degrees, or to demonstrate minimal levels of work experience.…”

The Price of Probity: Anticorruption and Adverse Selection in the Chinese Bureaucracy

“…The tuition typically amounts to 20-30 per cent of an entry-level official's annual salary; some schools offer tuition assistance to government officials to encourage their application. 16 Liu (2019) and Meng, Pan and Yang (2017) use a similar approach to sample government officials. 17 Given the high concentration of government officials, MPA programs are typically unwilling to let outside researchers survey their students; access depends heavily on personal connections.…”