Power And Rule:Analysis On The Evolution Of Village's Committee Election

How to improve governance level and to realize the modernization of governance capacity is the important content of Chinese politics. Obviously, there is a close relationship between the village committee election and governance level and governance capacity. It is the time to explore the way to achieve the modernization of governance level and capacity through the study of village committee elections in rural China. It is showed that the village committee election has made significant contribution to the grassroots governance promoting and the governance capacity improving, and somewhat improved not only in the election procedure but also in the election process, as well as in the election quality in the past three decades. Therefore,what development stage did the village committee election at, how did the village committee election evolve and what is the driving force of this evolution? Those questions are the core of this paper.The evolution of the village committee election is divided into four stages,namely, full-controlling village committee election stage, semi-controlling village committee election stage, semi-competitive village committee election stage, and full-competitive village committee election stage through the election observation and case analysis of 40 villages from C?T towns. The election competition is closely connected with the various complex power relation and rules constraint in the village committee election, in other words, the power and rule are the important variables to influence competition. Further study reveals that the village committee election can be seen as a dynamic process of power operation under the constraint of rules by the various involved participants; and there is a close connection between the evolution of the village committee election and the power and rules operating logic. The election competition has great differences under different combination types between the power and rules in the election. The village committee election with the constrain of informal power and informal rules is much more controlled by the informal poweroutside the autonomy power, with a deterministic result and no competition. Only when the formal power and formal rules work in village committee election, can the election actually be led by the election procedure and rules, can the election process be supervised by various forces, can the sufficiency and wide-ranging of elector participation be greatly improved, can the adequacy of election competition be guaranteed, finally can it be a real election. Consequently, the analysis of the relationship among the election, power and rule has great significance for grasping the village committee election logic, promoting the village committee election benign development, and then enhancing the grassroots governance.