The Rise and Fall of Electoral Democracy: A Social Evolutionary Approach to Direct Election Experiments in Local China

This paper analyzes the emergence and evolution of direct elections (DE) for officials at township-level government in China using social evolutionary theory. The explanations provided by existing research using modernization theory or rational choice theory are not sufficient for fully understanding innovation and change of grassroots democratic institutions across China as a whole. This paper argues that the experiment of DEs at the township level is an institutional reform driven by external forces. Under the pressure of financial crisis, a small number of county-level political elites challenged existing thinking and initiated this institutional innovation. The diffusion, continuation and subsequent breakdown of this innovation was the result of the interactions between the external actors of local political elites, the central government, and public opinion led by media and scholars following major fiscal structural changes. Our research finds that during the period of continuation, it is the central government who plays the most pivotal role amongst the external actors and continues to determine the future evolution of this institutional innovation. This paper concludes that a social evolutionary approach has strong explanatory power regarding analyzing institutional changes around local elections.