Why are some authoritarian regimes more resilient than others? Scholars have pointed to authoritarian institutions, such as parties and legislatures, as one of the key factors explaining the variations in political and economic performance among authoritarian regimes. Making Autocracy Work, by Rory Truex, makes a fantastic contribution to this line of scholarship by investigating an important case – China's National People's Congress (NPC).
Making Autocracy Work challenges the conventional wisdom that the NPC is a rubber stamp which does not represent citizens’ preferences in China. Through a sophisticated argument and innovative empirical strategies, Truex makes a provocative case that the NPC does channel bottom-up preferences into national policymaking. Truex coined the term “representation within bounds,” and suggests that NPC deputies offer important information on local citizens’ preferences for non-sensitive policy areas, but restrain themselves from pressing the government in more sensitive policy areas such as political reforms and human rights issues. The information from NPC deputies subsequently allows the Chinese government to design policies that enhance regime survival. To support his arguments, Truex has collected several amazing sets of data and he exhibits impressive skills in using mixed methods and cutting-edge empirical strategies in a challenging research environment where researchers constantly face data limitations.
In a nutshell, the informational role of the NPC is the cornerstone of Truex's “representation within bounds” theoretical framework. The theory in Making Autocracy Work rests on the premise that regime survival requires autocrats to placate the citizens by providing a minimum standard of welfare, but autocrats often have incomplete information on citizen preferences. The authoritarian legislature, the NPC in the Chinese case, helps solve the autocrats’ information deficiency problem. Not all information, Truex argues, will be incorporated into policymaking, because autocrats are keen to maintain monopoly in the political sphere. Specifically, NPC deputies’ legislative behaviours rarely reflect citizen preferences on sensitive issues, such as political reforms and human rights. According to Truex, the regime cultivates “selective empathy” among NPC deputies by providing training sessions and re-electing those whose behaviours serve the needs of the regime. Using a game theological model, Truex lays out the conditions under which “representation within bounds” plays a major role in authoritarian politics.
The rest of the book aims to test various aspects of the main theoretical framework. Chapters three and four evaluate NPC deputies’ influence and representativeness in policymaking. Through a combination of interviews, a case study of Hainan Provincial People's Congress's proposals and his analyses of survey data, Truex finds supporting evidence that Chinese legislators have some influence on policymaking and represent citizen preferences to an extent. One may question the findings on the grounds that most evidence is drawn from data at the sub-national level. As recent studies of Chinese legislature suggest, local people's congresses are more active in exerting their influence in policymaking than the NPC. In addition, the sampling strategy in the China Survey that the author used in generating citizen policy preferences is not representative at the provincial level. However, we have to recognize the difficulties in conducting empirical analysis of the NPC due to the lack of transparency. Truex rightly points out that the strongest mechanism for deputy influence is the opinions and motions process (p. 55). More importantly, NPC deputies’ proposals sometimes do capture the public opinions on social issues.
Chapters five and six turn to an investigation into the selection of NPC deputies and their “return to office.” Using various sophisticated techniques, such as matching analysis and entropy balancing to deal with selection bias problems, Truex finds evidence that the deputies who have behaved according to the rules established by the regime are more likely to be re-elected. More importantly, those NPC deputies who work in publicly listed firms enjoy better economic performance for their firms.
Overall, one can certainly agree that the NPC deputies are not completely “tone-deaf” in channeling citizens’ preferences. However, the information provided by the NPC is only one of the multiple mechanisms that offer competing, sometimes conflicting, information on local conditions and citizen preferences to policymakers. The Chinese government, similar to many post-Communist regimes, has established a number of mechanisms to collect information and monitor local conditions in order to solve the information problem. For example, government bureaucracies often conduct their own investigations and hold meetings with various stakeholders before making any major policies. In addition, the government has established various internal government information collection agencies in order to identify and address public discontent. Meanwhile, other scholars have pointed out that public protests and grievances can serve as alternative channels for the Chinese government to gather information concerning local discontent. Finally, the Chinese government has built various national and local apparatuses to manage and collect information over the internet. Given there are many information channels, to what extend does the NPC provide meaningful representation and critical information in policymaking? After all, policymaking is always a struggle among competing preferences by various stakeholders, even in autocracies.
If information is not the main function that the NPC serves in Chinese politics, what is the alternative explanation for legislative behaviour? It might be too early for Truex to dismiss the alternative arguments listed at the end of his chapter two. In fact, chapter seven, which aims to describe the evolution of the NPC, could have been a great opportunity to put the “representation within bounds” phenomenon in the context of the institutionalization of Chinese politics. Perhaps the NPC serves different purposes within the regime at different points of China's political development. The process of institutionalization of Chinese politics and the rise of the NPC warrant further research to understand the institutionalization of authoritarian rule and institutional building.
