As described in Chapter 1, popular elections of local congresses in China now feature legally mandated contestation and secret ballots, both major breaks from the Maoist past. Even so, a Chinese street vendor shared with me his dismissal of the elections as a waste of time: “The results have all been worked out ahead of time. Voting is not going to affect the outcome.” The inference that the game is rigged from the outset reflects pessimism about voter influence in the candidate selection process and, by implication, in elections. Quite apart from any political resonance it may have, is it a reasonable inference? Certainly, even far below the center of power in Beijing and after some 30 years of reform, voter choices at the ballot box are greatly restricted. Yet, candidate selection for local congresses is also newly inclusive. Indeed, as I elaborate in this chapter, most township and county congress nominees are voter (not party) nominees, and most candidates on the ballot (as well as most elected delegates) are voter-nominated candidates. To what extent does Communist Party power effectively annul electoral voice for ordinary Chinese in township and county congress elections?

Most of the literature in comparative politics that is directly relevant to this question treats elections as the autocrat's solution to her or his monitoring problem: elections enlist ordinary citizens to convey information, with votes, about the performance of politicians at lower levels (see Geddes 2006; Magaloni 2006; Brownlee 2007; Gandhi 2008; Malesky and Schuler 2008; Simpser 2013). To help solve the autocrat's monitoring problem, elections need not provide perfect information about popular preferences, of course, but it seems they must at least gauge them approximately. That is, elections cannot be managed so as to deprive votes of any informational worth. This seems to suggest that such elections must also go at least some way toward solving the voter's monitoring problem. How else to enlist voters to gauge the performance of politicians? Yet, even in liberal democracies, monitoring politicians is difficult, sanctioning their bad performance in office often ineffective (see Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin 1999). For a variety of reasons reviewed in this book's introduction, autocracies are worse (in fact, much worse) than are liberal democracies at solving the moral hazard problem for voters in their agency relationship with politicians.