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Journal of Chinese Political Science
Published in: Journal of Chinese Political Science 3/2020

16-08-2019 | Research Article

Local Economic Development and the Performance of Municipal People’s Congress Deputies in China: an Explanation for Regional Variation

Author: Chuanmin Chen

Published in: Journal of Chinese Political Science | Issue 3/2020

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Abstract

Recent research has revealed the importance of China’s People Congress deputies for authoritarian resilience and explained the historical and individual variations in their behaviors, but the regional variation in the performance of deputies among different local congresses still has not been explored. Based on an original dataset of Municipal People’s Congresses across China, this article illustrates that the variation in the deputy activity of local congresses is mainly caused by the uneven development of the local economy. The results of different statistical models all show that the per capita numbers of deputy proposals of congresses are higher in the regions with larger GDP per capita. The study provides a new explanation for the behaviors of People’s Congress deputies in China and contributes to the research on the performance of subnational authoritarian parliaments.
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Footnotes
1
The data are from the Shenzhen Statistical Yearbook.
 
2
Interview with Shenzhen MPC deputy 01, Shenzhen, 7 May 2013; Interview with Shenzhen MPC deputy 02, Shenzhen, 11 February 2015.
 
3
The data are collected by the author.
 
4
Municipal yearbooks usually report the work of MPCs in corresponding years and contain the numbers of proposals submitted by MPC deputies. The work reports of MPCs also report these numbers. There is no difference between the two.
 
5
The number of deputies usually changes slightly during the 5-year term of an MPC, but in this study, I ignore the change and regard the number at the beginning of an MPC’s term to be invariant over the whole term.
 
6
The GDP deflator is computed based on data from the China Statistical Yearbook.
 
7
The “resource city” was defined in 2013 by the State Council, but because the reserve and output of natural resource usually change little in a short period, it can be regarded as a time-invariant variable indicating whether the local economy of a region is dependent on natural resources during 2008–2012.
 
8
Larger cities include all provincial capitals and the other cities that are approved by the State Council as “larger cities”, but in this article, they do not include special economic zones.
 
9
Before the revision of the Legislation Law in 2015, only the MPCs in special economic zones, autonomous prefectures, and larger cities held legislative power. Since 2015, all MPCs have obtained legislative power.
 
10
The variable is coded according to the situation at the beginning of the year.
 
11
Interview with a district-level PC official, Shenzhen, 27 January 2015.
 
12
If the first session of a term is held on or before July 30, the year is defined as the first year of the term. If the first session is held after July 30, the next year is defined as the first year of the term.
 
13
Please note that the key independent variable is the one-year lag of GDP pc.
 
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Metadata
Title
Local Economic Development and the Performance of Municipal People’s Congress Deputies in China: an Explanation for Regional Variation
Author
Chuanmin Chen
Publication date
16-08-2019
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Chinese Political Science / Issue 3/2020
Print ISSN: 1080-6954
Electronic ISSN: 1874-6357
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-019-09630-1

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