Page 305 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes French voters derived great satisfaction from knowing that, unlike past parliamentary elections,
national and not parochial alignments were at stake, and that they were invited to pronounce
themselves effectively on such issues. The traditional and once deeply rooted attitude that the
only useful vote was against the government no longer made sense when almost everybody
knew that the task was to elect an executive endowed with strong powers for seven years.
Accordingly, turnout in presidential elections, with one exception, has been the highest of all
elections.
• In the communist party-state, political participation, interest articulation, and interest aggregation
are processes that are different from those normally, found in liberal democratic systems. The
source of difference is, of course, different conceptions of the relationship between leaders and
citizens: the notion of guardianship is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democratic
notions of representation. The Communist Party organization claims to represent the interests
of all society, but it rejects, as unnecessary and unacceptable, organized interest groups
independent of the Communist Party and political parties other than the communists.
• The first category of rule changes involves political participation, which has become essentially
optional for ordinary Chinese since the early 1980s. In the first 30 years of communist rule, for
a broad range of political activities, failure to participate was considered tantamount to opposition
to the communist regime. Today, politics intrudes far less in the lives of ordinary Chinese. The
scope and demands of politics have shrunk. The single most important measure sig-nifying
this change is the official removal, in 1979, of all class and political labels.
• The second category has been the assiduous avoidance by the regime to rouse the mass public
to realize policy objectives. In the Maoist years, by contrast, the quintessential form of political
participation was the mass mobilization campaign— intensive, large-scale, disruptive group
action, imple-mented by grassroots leaders. The Great Leap Forward launched in 1958 and the
Cultural Revolution launched in 1966 were essentially mass campaigns, on a gargantuan scale
(with some unique features, of course).
• The third category was the rejection of mass mobilization as the dominant mode of political
participation. Chinese leaders have instead encouraged ordinary citizens to express their
opinions and participate in politics through a variety of regular official channels, some new,
others newly revived: offices of letters and visits, centers and telephone hot-lines to report
abuses of power, and letters to newspaper editors, for example.
• In 1979, a new election law introduced direct election of deputies to county-level congresses,
mandated secret ballots rather than public displays of support, and required the number of
candidates to be one and a half times the number of deputies to be elected. Although local
Communist Party organizations continue to play a key leadership role in election committees,
essentially vetting candidates, not all candidates can win under current rules. Some officially
nominated candidates lose elections. Indeed, some candidates officially designated for
government office (which requires initial election to congresses) lose elections. A growing number
of candidates who are not communist party members have competed and won in elections.
• The revitalization of village committees in 1987 was designed to make the countryside more
governable by increasing accountability. Presumably, villagers would be more responsive to
leaders elected from below rather than those imposed from above as before.
• In 1997 and 1998, when top leaders affirmed the experience of village elections, most villages
had undergone at least three rounds of elections, with enormous local variation in
implementation. In many (perhaps most) villages, the village Communist Party branch controlled
candidate nomination, there was no candidate choice for the key position or village committee
director, and voting irregularities were common.
• In 1989, a different sort of urban unrest captured the attention of the world news media and,
consequently, of the world. The demonstration that brought a million people to Tiananmen
Square was the third major political protest movement since Mao’s death. The first was in 1978-
1979, the second in 1986-1987. All three differed fundamentally from the mass campaigns of the
Maoist years, all were officially unacceptable, all were linked in some important way to official

300 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY