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A
group of German scientist made public their attempt to analyze
local direct elections in the People's Republic of China.
Gunter Schubert of a protestant research center in Heidelberg
noted the importance of further research in the fields of
local self-governance in Chinese villages in the latest issue
of Asien, a journal of the German Association for Asian
Studies. The research project 'Village and Urban
Neighborhood Elections in the PRC: Driving Forces of Democracy
or Institutional Arrangement to Consolidate One-Party Rule'
was initiated by Schubert and Thomas Heberer, professor of
political science at the university of Duisburg, and is funded
by the German Science Association and the Ministry of Economic
Cooperation. Schubert notes in his article that although
village elections have been introduced in the 1980s,
scientists only recently started to do research on the
implications and scope of such elections. Research projects so
far have focused on the procedural quality of village
elections, the changing relationship between peasants and
village committees, and the new role of party cadres in local
politics after the introduction of local elections. Schubert
and his research team aim at shedding
new light on the role of local elections in China's
political development by analyzing the competitiveness of
elections, the attitudes of the ordinary people towards the
elected officials and their newly gained political power, and
the impact of such elections on national politics. Moreover,
Schubert tries to answer the question how local cadres deal
with the double bind of 'democratic accountability'
towards the electorate and their obligation to obey the party
line. Schubert's research team plans to use
semi-standardized questionnaires to interview voters and party
cadres at all levels of government. The team will visit
villages in three provinces: Guandong, Shandong, and Jianxi.
The first has been selected because it is considered a
'model region' (good electoral implementation and strong
economic development), the second is believed to be an
'average region' (lower degree of electoral implementation
and economic development), and the last is viewed an
'under-average region' (low degree of electoral
implementation and economic development).
Project discussion paper Village
Elections in PRC: a Trojan Horse of Democracy?
(PDF format requires
ACROBAT
Reader)
by Gunter Schubert
Taiwan: a model
for China?
In
his paper, Schubert also poses the question whether local
elections in China will have the same effects on the overall
political development as they have had on Taiwan’s
liberalization and democratization processes. This assumption
can neither be categorically denied nor confirmed. What has
been proved, however, is that fully-fledged local
self-governance was the key to Taiwan’s democratic opening (see
Christian Schafferer The
Power of the Ballot Box: Political Development and Election
Campaigning in Taiwan).
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