Doctoral Dissertation Research - Behavioral Traits and Political Selection in Authoritarian Ruling Parties

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Mechanisms behind the political stability of single-party regimes have long interested scholars and policymakers. As authoritarian ruling parties share many similarities with corporations regarding personnel management, a growing body of literature examines the role of personnel selection in durability and survival of authoritarian parties. When examining behaviors of authoritarian party elites and strategies of intra-party personnel selection, however, the existing literature exclusively focuses on the roles of situational factors, such as environmental and structural constraints, and task performance. Dispositional factors and behavioral patterns at the individual level, which have been thoroughly discussed in research on electoral politics and firm management, have been overlooked in the authoritarianism literature. This project challenges the assumption that authoritarian party elites have monolithic dispositional attributes and the proposition that situational factors and task performance play dominant roles in authoritarian personnel selection. This project argues that risk propensities, a major behavioral trait at the individual level, have profound behavioral outcomes in party elites? obedience to the leadership and policy implementation. Meanwhile, authoritarian parties also manage and assign the cadres based on their behavioral traits. Using the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a research case, this project contributes to a burgeoning body of literature on authoritarian ruling parties and broadens our knowledge of political behavior in non-democratic contexts. This project also presents original data on behavioral traits and outcomes of party cadres in China, where political elite data are notoriously difficult to obtain. This project sheds light on our understanding of authoritarian ruling parties by incorporating original quantitative and qualitative evidence. This project designs and implements an original survey experiment among 1,000-2,000 medium-level CCP party cadres who participate certificate programs at a major university in China. The survey seeks to measure behavioral traits and opinions of party cadres by employing a variety of measures of risk propensities, survey experiments that feature priming cues about different aspects of career uncertainties, and a series of endorsement experiments. In the meantime, this project will also collect distributional data of cadres with different behavioral traits and uses the information to understand the CCP's personnel management strategies. To supplement the quantitative data, a series of interviews will be conducted with serving and retiring senior party cadres and collect archival data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.