| Despite fundamental differences between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, ordinary citizens in the latter polities also try to influence government policy outcomes. Since the launch of the reforms more than two decades ago, the Chinese Communist Party has abandoned the Maoist mobilization of citizens in mass political campaigns. Instead, political mobilization is achieved through the process of careful recruitment of party members. The Party's decision to recruit a citizen (or not) is a strategic choice conditioned on the expected participatory behavior of individual citizens. At the same time, political participation by individual citizens to influence government policy takes into account the Party's recruitment decision. Participation as a recruited or un-recruited citizen are two distinct outcomes that bring different benefits and costs for the individuals involved. The patterns of political recruitment and participation can be seen as the aggregate outcome of the choices made by the Party and by individual citizens. My research studies whether and how these two political choices are interdependent processes of decision making and explores the effects of important factors such as age, education, and social organization.; The dissertation proceeds through multiple approaches. I begin by proposing a new conceptualization of the relationship between Party recruitment and political participation, which establishes an important connection between two thus far separate bodies of literature. I then generate hypotheses about both the Party's and an individual citizen's preferences over different outcomes of recruitment and participation. This incorporates my interviews of Party officials, ordinary Party members, and non-Party masses during my field research. A simple game theory model lays the foundation for the statistical analysis of data from a 1993–94 national survey. I first show that recruitment and participation respectively are significant predictors of each other. In the third step, I find that participation by recruited citizens and participation by un-recruited citizens are indeed determined by distinct sets of utility components. Finally, to test the joint hypotheses I apply the statistical strategic method, which is specifically designed for the analysis of data where strategic elements can render the results of logit or probit problematic. |
