Previous research on political participation, like that on political trust discussed in Chapter 5, focused on the instrumental rationality of political actors. Following the work of Anthony Downs, scholars have theorized that the decision to participate in politics is shaped primarily by a cost-benefit calculation: actors participate if they expect that the benefits of participation will exceed the costs (Downs Reference Downs1957). This has led students to concentrate on variables such as education, income, occupation, political interest, and efficacy, which can reduce the costs and/or increase the perceived benefits of participation. Empirical research based on data from the United States and other Western countries confirms that these sociological and psychological variables significantly influence the likelihood that people will participate in politics (Verba and Nie Reference Verba and Nie1972).

When applying sociological and psychological models to the study of political participation in different countries, however, scholars have found that the explanatory power of socioeconomic status and psychological resources varies from country to country. To explain this Verba, Nie, and Kim sought to explore the effect of institutions (defined as political parties and voluntary associations) in mobilizing or demobilizing people for participation. Institutions, they surmised, could affect actors’ ability to convert sociological and psychological resources into political activities. Institutions can mobilize political activities (for example, by exposing people to politically relevant stimuli, such as discussions about politics or social issues); provide opportunities for political activities (developing skills and expectations that can be generalized to political activities); and sometimes centralize control over the channels of political activities such that unaffiliated persons cannot participate (Verba, Nie, and Kim Reference Verba, Nie and Kim1978, 81).

Since institutions in different societies affect participation in different ways, the impacts of socioeconomic status on participation vary from country to country (Verba et al. Reference Verba, Nie and Kim1978, 80). Empirical evidence from surveys conducted in seven countries confirms that political parties and voluntary associations do interact with sociological resources to influence people’s decisions to participate in politics.

What puzzles students of comparative politics, though, is that even when the effects of institutional differences are taken into account, there are still major cross-national variations in the impacts of sociological and psychological variables. For one thing, dramatic increases in the general level of education in the West failed to produce similarly dramatic increases in participation in those societies. Moreover, socioeconomic status has little impact on the level of participation in Japan, despite the similar, if not identical, nature of the regimes and in patterns of institutional involvement in Japan and other, Western democracies (Flanagan et al. Reference Flanagan, Kohei, Miyake, Richardson and Watanuki1991). Similarly, social resources such as education and income in Taiwan were found to have little impact on people’s propensity to vote (Shyu Reference Yu2009).

Some scholars attribute these variations to political culture. Most studies of cultural impacts on political participation, following the pioneering work of Almond and Verba, characterize culture as a combination of political interest, efficacy, information, and civic orientation. These variables, they argue, can have significant impacts on people’s political behavior (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes1960; Milbrath and Goel Reference Milbrath and Goel1982; Verba and Nie Reference Verba and Nie1972; Verba et al. Reference Verba, Nie and Kim1978, Reference Verba, Schlozman, Brady and Nie1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995; Wolfinger and Rosenstone Reference Wolfinger and Rosenstone1980). Although it is true that instrumental cost-benefit calculations can play a critical role in shaping people’s participation, I argue that culturally defined normative rationality plays an equally, if not more, important role. Understanding its impacts is vital to an accurate understanding of the process by which people become politicized to participate in politics.¹

Unlike theories that assess how cultural variables increase the perceived benefits and reduce the costs associated with participatory activities, my theory investigates how culture influences participation by defining the costs and benefits of actions. Rather than simply influencing whether an actor participates, norms as defined by culture influence the whole process by which people respond to outside stimuli. In this process, as discussed in Chapter 1, actors need to make three decisions. First they need to decode information to understand its meaning and implications and assign responsibility. Unless they hold the government responsible for dealing with a problem, they would not think of responding by participating in politics. Second, actors need to decide how to respond – they may choose “voice” (participation) or “exit” (trying to avoid the problem) (Hirschman Reference Hirschman1970). Third, if actors decide to use “voice,” they must choose a particular political act to express their opinion. This chapter explores the impacts of cultural norms on each of these decisions.

The Cultural Theory of Political Participation and the Chinese Case

Prominent theories of political participation usually assume, albeit implicitly, that political actors all use the same standards to evaluate government performance and to define political goals and actions. My theory instead argues that the standards individuals use for these purposes differ in a systematic way for people holding different norms. Building on the theory developed in Chapter 2, I expect culture to influence participation in the following ways. First, norms define the proper role of government and thus shape people’s expectations toward authority and standards for evaluating performance and behavior. For example, when state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms cause people to lose their jobs, the policy may be decoded in different ways depending upon one’s definition of self-interest. Those influenced by the allocentric definition may deem the policy legitimate, even though they may lose their jobs, as long as it can benefit the society as a whole in the long run. People holding the idiocentric definition, on the other hand, may oppose the policy on the grounds that it jeopardizes their private interest. A survey by Wenfang Tang revealed that people in Shenyang who lost their jobs due to SOE reform responded to the policy in different ways: some cursed the reform and the government, while others said they supported the policy even if it had deprived them of their jobs (Tang Reference Tang2005). Similarly, people holding different orientations toward authority hold government responsible for different issues. As a general rule, people with a hierarchical orientation consider their government responsible for a broader array of issues than those defined by reciprocal orientation.

Second, culture defines the goals actors can pursue in their responses to government. Students of political participation typically assume that a person will participate in politics if he or she has the resources and ability to link a personal need to government policy. My theory argues, however, that even when people’s material interests are jeopardized by the government and they have the sociological and psychological resources to participate in politics, their cultural norms may deny them the normative authorization to do so. For example, allocentric DSI does not give the laid-off SOE worker the option of pursuing the goal of opposing the reform policy. The exception is when government officials are found to have promoted a policy for personal gain, but even then the main purpose of political participation is to convey society’s desires to the government, rather than press for policy change per se. The guidance provided by idiocentric DSI does give the worker the option of pressing for policy change and, if the government fails to respond favorably, to oppose the government and to seek its replacement.

Finally, cultural norms define the legitimate means people can choose to pursue their goals under different situations. An actor may choose to make an appeal to government officials, reach up the ladder of the bureaucracy to persuade higher level officials to intervene on his or her behalf, contact the media to expose the wrongdoings of local officials, or engage in unconventional political acts to protest. For rational choice theorists, the reason actors chose one action and avoid another lies purely in resources (Verba et al. Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). While I do not deny that resources matter, I argue that culture plays an equally, if not more, important role in shaping such decisions.

The dramatic changes in China between our two surveys in 1993 and in 2002 provide a rare opportunity to demonstrate culture’s independent impacts on political participation. As noted in Chapter 1, many scholars who agree that culture has some influence over people’s political behavior argue that these impacts are endogenous to social structure and/or political institutions. They believe that when society modernizes or institutions change, culture adjusts, so that its impact on behavior merely transmits the causal effects of structure or institutions rather than exerting an independent effect. To establish the plausibility of my theory, I need to show that culture can influence people’s participatory behavior independently of the influence of structure and institutions.

I showed in Chapter 4 that dramatic changes in China and Taiwan between 1993 and 2002 had limited impacts on the distribution of cultural norms in the two societies. This rules out the hypothesis that cultural norms quickly adapt to changing circumstances. But even if the distribution of norms in a society remains relatively stable, structural and institutional changes might alter the functioning of either the internal policing system of norms or the external policing system of norms (Chapter 4). Changes of the type Eckstein called pattern-maintaining change and cultural flexibility might occur even if the distribution of norms changes little. Such a finding would show that cultural forces are, after all, endogenous to social and political forces as causes of action.

The situation in China constitutes a nearly perfect quasi-experimental setting for examining these issues. Between 1993 and 2002, both social structures and institutions underwent dramatic changes while culture remained stable. If cultural impacts on political participation are endogenous to structures and/or institutions as those theories assume, the impacts on participation should vary significantly, or even vanish, between the two surveys. Alternatively, if structure and institutions have undergone a dramatic change, but cultural impacts on political participation remain stable, this would strengthen my theory that culture is exogenous to institutions and structure and has independent impacts on political behavior.²

In both the 1993 and 2002 surveys, respondents were asked to report their engagement in both electoral and non-electoral participatory activities. I decided to exclude electoral participation from my inquiry for three reasons. First, electoral participation, especially voting, requires less initiative from participants than non-electoral participation, as asserted by Verba and Nie: “A voter does not choose the agenda; he doesn’t choose the issues that divide the candidates, nor does he usually have much voice in choosing the candidates themselves” (Verba and Nie Reference Verba and Nie1972, 106). Second, mobilization often plays an important role in shaping people’s decisions to vote, creating a causal pathway to participation that is different from the one I wish to investigate here (Rosenstone and Hansen Reference Rosenstone and Hansen1993). Third, the development of electoral reform is uneven in China. Although most rural residents can choose village officials through competitive elections, urban dwellers still do not enjoy that right, so many of the subjects in my data set have no voting opportunity to report. Given these considerations, I decided to concentrate my inquiry on non-electoral participatory activities.

Table 6.1 presents the percentage of people who reported participating in a variety of political acts in 1993 and 2002. The table also shows the difference and rate of change for each item between the two surveys. Despite increases both in people’s need for government help during a time of turbulent reform and in their resources for participation as a consequence of economic growth and social development, the level of participation declined in most categories. There was some increase in participatory activities directed to levels beyond the work unit or community (the people’s congresses, newspapers, and complaint bureaus), but this was outbalanced by declines in participation within the grassroots unit.

Table 6.1. Non-Electoral Participation in Mainland China

^a The raw frequencies in N columns do not add up to the sample sizes due to missing values.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183). Data are weighted.

To identify the role of cultural factors in this decline requires analysis of the whole process by which actors become politicized and participate in politics. Political scientists have traditionally been concerned only with the final decision made by political actors to participate or not. However, as suggested above, actors actually make three related decisions leading up to the act of participation. In the analysis that follows I seek to tease out the impacts of social structure, institutions, and culture on each of these decisions. First I examine the impact of culture on perceived government salience, that is, the likelihood people will see the government as relevant to problems they encounter. The second step is to explore the impact of culture on the likelihood that people will participate. Finally, I examine if and how cultural norms influence people’s choices of political acts and goals by prescribing some participatory activities and proscribing others.

Impacts of Culture on Perceived Government Salience

Perceived government salience for our purposes can be defined as the propensity for political actors to hold government responsible for solving the problems they encounter. Culture fundamentally shapes this decision. Even if a problem is caused, or could be solved, by a government policy, actors under the influence of certain norms may not hold the governmentresponsible for it. Alternatively, an actor can hold the government responsible for solving a problem that has nothing to do with government policy. For example, when an SOE employee is laid off, he can assign blame for his misfortune variously: he could blame himself, his manager in the enterprise, the local or central government, the CCP, and/or the political system. Only if the employee sees some level of government as responsible for the problem is he likely to think of participating in politics to get it solved.

Conventional theories of political participation presume that variations in perceived government salience are due to differences in citizens’ socioeconomic and psychological resources (Goel Reference Goel1975; Huntington Reference Huntington1968; Nie et al. Reference Nie, Powell and Prewitt1969a, Reference Nie and Powell1969b). Citizens are portrayed as knowledgeable, or not knowledgeable, about the impact of government on their daily lives and attentive or inattentive to government, depending on their cognitive capacity, political interest, and sociological resources.

But cultural norms also play an important role. Cultural definitions of the relationship between individuals and authority serve as a yardstick for assessing the government’s responsibility for solving problems. Reciprocal OTA defines the government as an institution run by staff hired to manage public affairs. I hypothesize that people holding the norm of reciprocal OTA will resist governmental attempts to intrude on issues outside the explicitly public domain. Where hierarchical OTA is widespread, as in China, however, people consider the government to be the guardian of the people and as such responsible for a broad array of issues. Until the 1980s, for example, when a married couple could not resolve their conflicts, the neighborhood committee, trade union, or village committee was expected to send a representative to mediate. Another example is the one-child policy, under which government dictates how many children a couple can have. Under the influence of hierarchical OTA such an infringement on people’s private lives is viewed as legitimate because of the claim that having too many children creates an extra burden for society.

Students of Chinese politics often argue that hierarchical OTA breeds dependency on the government and political passivity. This conceptualization is simplistic. Although it is true that hierarchical OTA creates a degree of dependency on government, rather than making people politically passive, it can actually make them more demanding. People under the influence of hierarchical OTA hold their government responsible for a much broader array of issues than those who subscribe to reciprocal OTA. As result, the government’s failure to intervene on social issues may trigger people’s political participation to demand that the government take responsibility. In addition, culture plays a role in helping people interpret political information. While reciprocal OTA holders assume that government officials will not protect people’s private interests unless they are forced to do so by proper institutional constraints, hierarchical OTA leads people to expect that government officials want to take care of people’s interests and that if they fail to do so it is because they are not aware of what the people need. Thus, we have:

Idiocentric DSI provides people with the normative authority to blame their government if and when government policies jeopardize their interests. Since governments can never satisfy everyone’s interests simultaneously, we should find that people with idiocentric DSI are more likely to express dissatisfaction with their government. Allocentric DSI, by contrast, deprives people of the normative authority to blame the government as long as government can claim its policies benefit a collective group with which the individual identifies. In interpreting government officials’ motivations, citizens will commonly project their own values onto government actors. Those with allocentric DSI are likely to assume that government policies are motivated by collective interests, further depriving norm holders of the normative authority to blame government. Together, this leads to:

I explored the plausibility of these arguments in face-to-face interviews with workers in a Beijing factory during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that took place 2002–3. Some respondents held the government responsible for the spread of the virus because it had withheld critical information from the public and believed it had done so for self-serving reasons – to guarantee the success of the annual National People’s Congress meeting. But others believed the government had handled the situation correctly, acting so as to protect the country’s economic development. When I pointed out to the latter that the government’s decision to hold back information had led to a larger outbreak, they defended the government, arguing that it had wanted to prevent unnecessary panic. One middle-aged worker argued: “If the government revealed information prematurely, foreign investors might have withdrawn from China. What if it was a false alarm? Our country’s economic development would have been jeopardized unnecessarily.”³ When I asked them what would have happened if they themselves had been infected, they replied that the government would have told them about the disease if necessary.

This second group of workers based their responses on two assumptions: (1) the government would take care of its people, so critical decisions could be deferred to it with confidence and (2) collective interests are more important than individual ones, and the government’s decision to withhold information must be aimed at protecting the public interest. Whereas the first assumption is shaped by hierarchical OTA, the second is shaped by allocentric DSI. Since the motivations of policy makers could not be directly observed, the respondents projected their cultural norms onto government officials and assumed they were following the same guidance.

To demonstrate this effect of culture empirically, I tested whether the norms, OTA and DSI, had statistically significant impacts on the likelihood that people would consider the government responsible for helping them with an issue. In both the 1993 and 2002 surveys, interviewers were asked to read the following statement to respondents:

Interviewers then asked respondents whether they had encountered any such problems during the three years prior to the survey. I classified those who said “yes” as showing an awareness of government’s salience. This variable, labeled “government salience,” differentiates those who reported having no problem needing government help (coded as 0) and those who reported having a problem needing government help (coded as 1). In 1993, 28.2 percent of respondents reported that they had not had any problems that required government intervention, and in 2002 that percentage dropped to 3.2 percent.⁴

The same four clusters of individual-level variables that I used in Chapter 5 – with some adjustments to account for standard theoretical expectations about the determinants of participation – are used in this chapter to predict dependent variables, beginning in this section with government salience. The first cluster of independent and control variables groups the sociological resources of education, income, urban residence, and gender. Education increases people’s cognitive skills, which help them to understand and work with complex and abstract subjects. Schooling also imparts experience with a variety of bureaucratic relationships through processes such as learning requirements, filling out forms, waiting in lines, and meeting deadlines (Wolfinger and Rosenstone Reference Wolfinger and Rosenstone1980). In short, education provides people with the skills necessary to process political information, link their problems to public authority, and calculate the costs and benefits of participation. Education was measured by years of formal schooling. Income is thought to be correlated with both the motives and the capabilities for participating in politics (Nie, Powell, and Prewitt Reference Nie, Powell and Prewitt1969a, 373; Wolfinger and Rosenstone Reference Wolfinger and Rosenstone1980). Income was measured by respondents’ total family incomes. Urban residence may increase participation because the relationship between individuals and the government in urban areas is more intense and multifaceted than in rural areas, especially in China where, until the reform era, people working in urban enterprises were socially, economically, and politically dependent on their government-run work units.⁵ Urban residence was measured by the respondent’s type of household registration. Age and age squared were also included in the model to assess both the linear and the curvilinear relationships between age and participation.

The second cluster of variables assesses the psychological resources of respondents: this includes political interest and internal and external efficacy. People who are interested in politics pay more attention to government activities and would thus be more likely to understand problems as a function of government policies. Political interest can reduce the costs and increase the perceived benefits of political participation. Political interest was measured by the question “How interested are you in political and governmental affairs? Would you say you are very interested, somewhat interested, not very interested, or not interested at all?” Responses were coded from 4 (very interested) down to 1 (not interested at all).

Political efficacy, as discussed in Chapter 5, refers to a person’s self-perceived ability to understand and influence politics and government. Internal efficacy refers to a belief in one’s own ability to understand and participate in politics, and external efficacy refers to the belief in the government’s responsiveness to citizens’ demands (Abramson and Aldrich Reference Abramson and Aldrich1982). Those who are internally and externally efficacious are expected to be more likely to call on government for help in resolving their problems. The two dimensions of efficacy were measured with widely used questionnaire items. To assess internal efficacy respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following three statements:

1. I think I understand major political problems facing our country well.

2. Politics and government are too complicated for a person like me to understand.

3. I consider myself capable of participating in politics.

People who agreed with the first and third questions and disagreed with the second were considered internally efficacious.

For external efficacy, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

1. Government officials don’t care much about what people like me think.

2. In our country, people have many ways to influence government decisions.

3. People like me do not have any right to speak about government policy.

People who agreed with the second question and disagreed with the first and third were considered externally efficacious. Factor analysis confirmed that the internal and external efficacy batteries measure separate dimensions of efficacy in China, as they do elsewhere. The indexes are created by adding the number of efficacious answers given in each battery.

The third cluster of variables measured the effects of institutions, focusing on the regime’s suppression of dissent and control of information. Conventional wisdom holds that regime suppression makes people retreat to their private lives and avoid political activity. A plausible alternative view, however, is that repression generates resentment so that people are more likely to hold government responsible for problems. I used the index of political fear described in Chapter 5 to test for the impact of regime suppression. I used the measure of exposure to official media described in the same chapter to see whether praise of the CCP in official media may raise people’s expectations of the government’s competency and their general expectations of government, such that they are more likely to hold government responsible for a wider range of problems. To measure the impact of unofficial information sources, I use the index of grapevine rumors, also described in Chapter 5.

The fourth cluster of individual-level variables consists of the IRT scores of the two cultural norms (see Chapter 3).

I was also interested in seeing whether variation in the cultural environment at the county level had an effect on perceived government salience. If so, this effect would have to be measured using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM, see Chapter 5). I first used a hierarchical ANOVA model to determine whether there was enough cross-county variation in government salience to warrant the use of HLM. The results of that analysis, presented in Appendix E, Table E.1, indicated that the average government salience is near zero in some counties, but in other counties nearly everyone holds government responsible for their problems. The finding of significant cross-county variation confirms that HLM can be used to examine how culture impacts perceived government salience at the county level.

Table 6.2 displays the results of the HLM analysis.⁶ Model I on the left side of the table looks only at individual-level effects.⁷ Model II on the right side adds the county-level analysis.⁸

Table 6.2. Cultural Impacts on Government Salience in Mainland China

*** p < .01; ** p < .05; * p < .1

^a Entries are restricted maximum likelihood unstandardized coefficients with HLM 6.06.

^b Entries are robust standard errors.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (N = 3,287).

In both models, most of the variables specified by social resource theory have statistically significant impacts. Better educated persons and those possessing urban household registration were more likely than their less educated or rural counterparts to hold the government responsible for problems they encountered. Males were more likely than females to hold government responsible. The relationship between age and government salience appears to be curvilinear – middle-aged people were more likely to hold the government responsible for their problems than either the young or the old.⁹ This finding confirms the well-documented start-up and slowdown effects of age on political participation (Wolfinger and Rosenstone Reference Wolfinger and Rosenstone1980). That is, younger people are usually busy with other activities and are less likely to be concerned about, or get involved in, politics; older people tend to gradually retreat from public life. Middle-aged people, however, are responsible for the issues facing their families and are more likely to attribute problems to their government. Income made no difference in government salience – the rich were no more or less likely to blame the government than the poor. The findings confirm that sociological resources play a critical role in raising government salience, which is a precondition for political participation.

The relationship between psychological resources and government salience seems counterintuitive. While political interest and internal efficacy had no impact on government salience, external efficacy made people less likely to look to government for solutions to their problems. This may be because people who see government as responsive to their demands believe that government has already done what it could to address their problems. Two of the three institutional variables had a significant impact on government salience. Access to both official and unofficial information made people more likely to view government as salient to their problems. Official media may foster the expectation that the government is an omnipotent force capable of solving any and every kind of problem, whereas information from unofficial channels may encourage people to blame government for problems. Political fear does not seem to prevent people from holding government responsible.

With all these variables accounted for, the table shows that cultural norms have statistically significant independent impacts on government salience. Idiocentric DSI at the individual level makes people more likely to hold government responsible for their problems. This finding confirms H2. Although OTA does not have a statistically significant impact at the individual level, its impact emerges at the county level in Model II. In an environment dominated by hierarchical norms, people are more likely to hold government responsible for a broader array of issues than in a place where reciprocal OTA is more influential. This confirms H1.

I also included the mean years of education for each county in Model II, to see whether a higher overall level of education in a community would increase the likelihood that people would perceive government as having an impact on their lives. This variable did not have a statistically significant impact.

Table 6.3 helps clarify the meaning of the coefficients in Table 6.2. The entries in Table 6.2 are unstandardized coefficients from a logit model. They represent the logged odds of the dependent variable for a one-unit change in the independent variable. For example, the coefficient of idiocentric DSI is 1.824, which means that one unit change in idiocentric DSI increases the logged odds of government salience by 1.824. Such a result has little intuitive meaning. It does not tell us whether idiocentric DSI plays a more or less important role than other variables in shaping government salience. To compare the impacts of my two cultural variables with that of education, Table 6.3 converts the coefficients of these variables from logged odds to probabilities. For each variable the table displays three values – people or counties with the highest and lowest scores of each independent variable, and people or counties in the middle (the mean value).¹⁰

Table 6.3. Comparing the Effects of Culture and Education on Government Salience in Mainland China

Source: 1993 Survey on Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (N = 3,287).

The table shows that cultural norms play a more important role than years of education in shaping how people perceive government salience. The mean value of education for the Chinese population in 1993 was 5.81 years (primary-school level). People with only primary school education were 1.7 percent more likely than illiterates to attribute their problems to the government. College graduates were 3.3 percent more likely than people with only primary school education to hold government responsible. If we compare college graduates to illiterates, the difference is 5 percent.

By contrast, people holding the highest value of idiocentric DSI were 5.4 percent less likely than people holding the mean value of DSI to attribute their problems to the government, and people holding the highest level of allocentric DSI were 5.9 percent more likely than people holding mean values of DSI to perceive government as salient. If we compare those holding extreme values of allocentric DSI to people holding extreme values of idiocentric DSI, the difference in probability that they would see government as salient reaches 11.3 percent.

OTA at the societal level played an even larger role. The average level of perceived government salience in the most reciprocally oriented counties in China was 22.36 percent lower than in the most hierarchically oriented counties. The average level of government salience of the most reciprocally oriented counties was 21.22 percent lower than in counties where OTA was at the mean level.

Three conclusions can be drawn. First, culturally defined normative rationality plays a critical role in politicizing people. The way in which political actors decode information is determined not only by government behavior and individual socioeconomic resources, but also by the norms of the culture in which people have been socialized. Ignoring the impacts of culturally defined standards of government behavior on government salience would lead to an omitted variable problem and distort the picture of how people become politicized in different societies. Second, OTA and DSI influence government salience through different channels – DSI primarily through individual psychology and OTA through people’s interactions with others in their community. When individuals rely on others to help them decode political information, the way those individuals interpret political information and assign responsibility is influenced by the dominant culture in the community. Finally, different dimensions of culture shape government salience in different directions. While allocentric DSI at the individual level makes people less likely to hold government responsible, hierarchical OTA at the communal level makes people more likely to hold government responsible. This is because allocentric DSI at the individual level requires people to take collective interests into consideration when they evaluate government policy, whereas a hierarchical environment creates high expectations of public authority.

Culture’s Effects on the Likelihood of Political Participation

After perceiving government as having influence over a problem, actors must make a second decision – how to deal with this awareness. They can decide to participate in politics to express dissatisfaction and try to effect change, or they can decide to put up with the situation. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, existing theories of political participation assume that actors base this decision on cost-benefit calculations. Sociological and psychological resources can reduce the costs and increase the perceived benefits of participation and thus are the major determinants of participation.

But people under the influence of different cultures do not necessarily define costs and benefits in the same way. Some interviews I held with unemployed workers in the city of Shenyang, Liaoning province, illustrate this. When I asked laid-off workers how they evaluated the government policy to reform SOEs, many of them expressed resentment. “I devoted my whole life to the factory,” one former worker said, “but the CCP’s policy encouraged the factory to abandon me without proper compensation. All the wealth we created over the course of our whole lives was stolen by the government officials. Of course, I am opposed to the current policy and would do anything I could to make their lives difficult.” For this worker, the fact that the policy jeopardized his personal interests justified expressing his dissatisfaction through confrontational political acts, even if such acts could not achieve policy change.

But another unemployed worker in the same city approached the issue from a different perspective. “People should not be too selfish,” he argued. “Everybody in our society should share the burden of our government rather than only being concerned with his own personal interests. You and I both know that the SOE reform is necessary. How can the current economic model continue if the SOEs do not make money? It is true that SOE reform hurt my interests, but the reform will benefit our country and our people as a whole in the long run. As a citizen of our country, I have an obligation to support such a policy, even if my personal interests are hurt by it.” The two respondents defined the costs and benefits in different ways, and this shaped their divergent responses to the policy.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that hierarchical OTA makes people more politically active. As the previous analysis demonstrated, the dependency created by hierarchical OTA raises people’s expectations of government. It gives people the expectation that the government will come to their rescue whenever they encounter any difficulties. If and when it does not, the norm grants the governed the authority to participate in politics. As the responsibility assigned to the public authority by reciprocal OTA is narrower than that of hierarchical OTA, people under the influence of reciprocal OTA are expected to be less politically active than people with hierarchical OTA. Thus, we have:

Since idiocentric DSI legitimates the self as the unit of interest calculation, it encourages people to participate in politics to guard their private interests. People under the influence of idiocentric DSI define their own interest instead of accepting the government’s community-centered definition of their self-interest. The norm allows people, in their cost-benefit calculations, to accord their own interests a higher priority than the interests of others or of society as a whole.

Taken together, these features suggest that people under the influence of idiocentric DSI should be more likely to participate in politics. Allocentric DSI, on the other hand, requires people to give up their self-interest for collective interests when the two are in conflict.¹¹ The norm discourages people from participating in politics to pursue private interests, endorsing such participation only when the private interest is seen as compatible with the collective interest. Finally, since allocentric DSI obligates people to consider the impacts of any political acts on their society’s collective interests, the norm increases the perceived costs of political activities. Therefore:

To test cultural impacts on the likelihood of political participation, I created a new dependent variable – “participation.” Within the category of those who reported having problems that the government could solve, this binary variable differentiates between those who participated in politics and those who did not. (People who reported that they had no problems to bring to the attention of government were dropped from the analysis. We included the remaining respondents: 2,379 interview subjects from the 1993 survey and 3,054 from the 2002 survey.) Those who engaged in any of the political activities listed in Table 6.1 were categorized as participant and scored as 1. Those who had a problem with the government but failed to engage in any participatory activities were categorized as nonparticipant and scored as 0.

The 1993 and 2002 China data sets were analyzed to answer the following two questions: First, do the two cultural norms affect the likelihood that people will participate in politics? Second, did social-structural and institutional changes between the two surveys alter culture’s impacts on participation?

As with the analysis of perceived government salience above, the first step was to find out whether China possessed sufficient cross-county variation in the level of participation to warrant the use of HLM. I again used a hierarchical ANOVA model for the analysis. As mentioned above, the populations of the study include only those people who claimed that they had problems with the government. The results of the analysis are shown in Table E.2 in Appendix E. On average, around one-fourth (25 percent) of people in some counties participated in politics, but around 90 percent of people in other counties engaged in some political acts. These results confirm the appropriateness of HLM as a tool for the task of analyzing political participation.

Accordingly, Table 6.4 displays the results of two statistical models for each of the two years.¹² The first model assesses the effects of individual-level variables on the likelihood of participation; the second adds an analysis of county-level variables.

Table 6.4. Cultural Impacts on the Likelihood of Political Participation in Mainland China

*** p < .01; ** p < .05; * p < .1

^a N = 2,379

^b N = 3,054

^c Entries are restricted maximum likelihood unstandardized coefficients with HLM 6.06.

^d Entries are robust standard errors.

Note: This analysis is limited to those who perceived the government as salient.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I.

At the individual level, none of the sociological resources – education, income, urban residence, or gender – had an independent effect on the likelihood that people would participate in politics in either 1993 or 2002. This does not mean that education and urban residency have no impact on political participation in China. However, as shown in Table 6.2, their impact is exerted through the perception of government saliency, whereas Table 6.4 shows that among those who saw government as salient to their problems, there is no additional impact of socioeconomic status on the decision of whether or not to participate.

Likewise, psychological resources play only a limited role in mobilizing people who perceive government as salient to participate. Among the three psychological resources examined in the model, only political interest had a positive impact on participation in both years. Given that people who reported no problems with their government were removed from the sample, the impact of political interest on participation cannot be attributed to cognition. Political interest may instead help people to acquire critical psychological resources that facilitate participation. In their study of “rightful resistance” in China, Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li argue that people usually appeal to central government policies to defend their interests against local officials (O’Brien Reference O’Brien1996; O’Brien and Li Reference O’Brien and Li2006). In doing so, actors borrow normative power from central government policies to change the balance of power between themselves and local bureaucrats (Shi Reference Shi1997). Information on central government policies is therefore an important enabling resource for political participation, and people interested in politics would be more likely to acquire this information. This suggests that political interest increases the level of political participation by helping participants acquire the political ammunition to defeat local officials.

The relationship between political efficacy and participation, on the other hand, appears to be unstable. In 1993, internal efficacy made respondents more politically active. This effect disappeared in 2002. Externalefficacy had no impact on political participation in either year. Political fear, rather than deterring people from political behavior, made participation more likely. The analyses also show that information acquired from official media sources had no impact on political participation among respondents viewing government as salient to their problems. This suggests that once the regime propaganda makes people assign more responsibility to public authority, it has no further impact on people’s political behavior. Information from unofficial channels, however, had a constant and significant impact on political participation. Those who reported access to grapevine rumors were more likely to participate in politics than people without access in both 1993 and 2002.

Turning to the impact of culture, with all other variables controlled, in both years, idiocentric DSI at both the individual and the county levels had a statistically significant impact on the decision to participate. This finding not only confirms H4 but also tells us that structural and institutional changes between 1993 and 2002 did not eliminate culture’s impacts on people’s participatory behavior.

The situation for OTA is different. It had no effect in 1993, but this changed in 2002, when individuals holding hierarchical OTA became more likely to participate in politics than people with reciprocal orientation. I showed in Chapter 4 that there was an increase in the number of people adhering to the traditional norm of hierarchical OTA between 1993 and 2002. Here we identify an additional change, which is an increasing tendency for those who hold hierarchical OTA to participate in politics.

To compare the impact of cultural norms on participation with the impact of sociological and psychological variables, I converted the coefficients of education, political interest, and cultural norms from logged odds to probabilities and present the results in Table 6.5. During the transformation, I again divided people and counties into three groups – those with the highest and lowest values of each independent variable and those with the mean value.

Table 6.5. Comparing the Effects of Cultural and Psychological Variables on Participation in Mainland China

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183).

I first calculated the impact of the most important psychological resource – political interest – on the probability that people would participate in politics. I found that people who were interested in politics had a higher probability of participating than those who were not interested in politics. In 1993 and 2002, the former were respectively 10.8 and 16.6 percent more likely than the latter to participate. Idiocentric DSI at the individual level, however, played a more important role in mobilizing people to participate than did political interest. In 1993, peopleholding the most extreme idiocentric DSI were 21.2 percent more likely to participate in politics than people holding the most extreme allocentric DSI. Compared with people in the middle of the DSI scale, those holding the most idiocentric DSI were 12.8 percent more likely to participate in politics, and those with the most allocentric DSI were 7.6 percent less likely to participate in politics.

Did structural and institutional changes in China between 1993 and 2002 bring about any pattern-maintaining changes in DSI? A comparison of the individual-level effects of DSI in 1993 and 2002 reveals that both the direction and magnitude of DSI’s impact on political participation were quite similar. People holding the most extreme allocentric DSI in 2002 were 20.4 percent more likely, as compared with 21 percent more likely in 1993, to participate in politics than those with extreme idiocentic DSI. The dramatic social-structural changes in China between 1993 and 2002 did not change the impacts of definition of self-interest on people’s participatory behavior.

OTA had no impact on participation in 1993, but the situation changed in 2002. Compared with people in the middle of the scale, people holding the most hierarchical OTA were 8.8 percent more likely to participate in politics, and people holding the most reciprocal OTA were 12 percent less likely to participate in politics. If we compare people with the most extreme hierarchical OTA to people with the highest score for reciprocal OTA, the difference reaches 20.7 percent.

To compare the impacts of county-level variables on the average level of political participation across counties, I converted the log odds of variables at the second level into probabilities. In 1993, the average level of participation in the most idiocentrically oriented counties was 16.3 percent higher than that in the most allocentrically oriented counties. In 2002, the figure rose to 18.4 percent.

Several conclusions may be drawn from the analyses in this section. First, culturally defined normative rationality has significant impacts on the decision to participate that are independent of the effects of social structures and institutions. Second, different dimensions of culture have different impacts on participation. While hierarchical OTA increases the likelihood that people will participate in politics, allocentric DSI decreases the likelihood. Viewing all traditional or all modern cultural norms as pushing behavior in the same direction is liable to conceal rather than reveal the ways in which culture affects political behavior.

Third, the relationships among social structure, political institutions, culture, and behavior are more complicated than previously understood. Structural and institutional changes between 1993 and 2002 altered neither the distribution of DSI in China nor its effect on political participation. However, contrary to the expectations of modernization theory, social change intensified rather than weakened both the commitment of many Chinese to hierarchical OTA and the efficacy of hierarchical OTA in motivating participation. Rather than making people update their normative orientations to make them compatible with new incentive structures, structural and institutional changes induced people to re-embrace traditional cultural norms and at the same time reinforced the norms’ impact on political behavior. Culture in China shifted in the opposite direction from that foreseen by Inglehart in his theory of cultural shifts (Inglehart Reference Inglehart1990).This pattern of change belongs to the category of cultural shift identified by Eckstein as pattern-maintaining change.

Cultural Impacts on People’s Choice of Confrontational Acts

Once people perceive government as salient to the solution of a problem they face and decide to take an action (other than voting) to try to obtain a government response, they must then choose among political acts.¹³ In China during the period under study, as shown in Table 6.1, the possible actions ranged from less confrontational to more confrontational. Contacting local officials, asking one’s immediate leaders for help, and seeking help from friends when dealing with government officials are acts that generate little social conflict because they respect the order of authority within the work unit or local government. Through such acts a citizen remonstrates with officials to remind them of their obligations to serve the people. Attempts to enlarge the scope of conflict by dragging higher-level government, party, or people’s congress officials into the issue are more confrontational because they present a challenge to the authority of local officials.¹⁴ Even more confrontational are tactics that may damage the careers of officials involved, such as writing letters to expose local officials’ wrongdoing to higher levels of the government, newspapers, and complaint bureaus. Going still further are acts like organizing colleagues to resist, harassing leaders, and participating in demonstrations and sit-ins, which may create instability in communities and generate severe conflict within the society.

The choices people make are consequential for the political system as a whole. Transitions to democracy may be triggered by social movements and other confrontational political activities. If a cultural norm discourages people from involvement in political activities that generate conflicts, democratic transition is less likely to occur.

Research on the means people choose for participating in politics, like research on the decision to participate, has been dominated by the rational actor model. Verba and his colleagues, for example, argue that the choice is shaped by instrumental cost-benefit calculations: for example, people with money are more likely to make campaign donations, and people with time are more likely to engage in campaign activities (Verba et al. Reference Verba, Schlozman and Brady1995). I agree that instrumental rationality plays a role in shaping people’s choices of political acts, but I argue that normative rationality is more fundamental to these choices because it defines the very legitimacy of various acts.

My interviews with laid-off workers in Shenyang illustrate how cultural norms play a role in shaping people’s selection of political acts. In response to being laid off, some made appeals to officials in their enterprises, others went up the bureaucratic ladder to seek help from higher-level officials, and others harassed their leaders or took to the street to protest. I asked those who confined their participation to their work units whether they thought more confrontational actions could bring them tangible benefits. Many told me that they believed they could. But why, then, did they refrain from choosing these more confrontational acts to pursue their goals?

Scholars of communist societies often attribute the avoidance of confrontational political activities to fear. To assess this explanation, I asked the laid-off workers whether they believed that such acts would be risky for them. Their answers were mixed: while some felt that such acts would trigger revenge from the regime, others argued that it was safe for them to engage in confrontational actions. For example, a worker in his forties told me that harassing an individual government official never triggers retaliation from the regime, even though the specific harassed official may retaliate. Furthermore, since the worst-case scenario – losing his job – had already occurred, revenge by individual officials was no longer a threat to him. Others told me that the government would not punish them for these acts because (1) protest requires the participation of many people, and the law cannot be used to punish a large group of people (fa buzezhong) and (2) past experiences had shown that local officials usually tolerated and tried to co-opt protesters if they confined their appeals to economic issues and avoided making any sort of political statement. These interviews suggest that political fear only partly explains why some people in China refrain from engaging in confrontational political acts.

Nor does the free rider problem fully explain such avoidance. Many respondents pointed out that local officials were sometimes forced to help people resolve their problems in order to avoid being continually harassed. These rewards were always selective, however, so that only those who harassed the leader got the rewards. Nonparticipants received no benefits. If respondents understood that protest could bring them desired benefits and perceived the risks of engaging in such acts as low, why did so many still avoid engaging in those acts? When I confronted the laid-off workers with that question, most of them told me that they refrained from harassing their leaders or getting involved in protest because it was not right to do so. A worker in Beijing put it this way:

Other respondents gave similar normative justifications for avoiding confrontational political acts. One unemployed worker told me that he refused to harass his leaders because that “would lower myself to the level of people who put their private interest above that of the country.”¹⁵ Another unemployed worker said, “I have no problem with making appeals to the government or going up the bureaucratic ladder to make appeals. But I understand that the government has its own difficulties.… As good citizens, we need to understand the government’s difficulty, rather than nao [create trouble] as some people did.”¹⁶

When I asked people who had pursued confrontational political acts why they had done so, their rationale was quite different from that of the first group. Several told me that they had the natural right to confront government and to make their voices heard. If the government refused to respond to conventional means, they would not hesitate to engage in confrontational activities. When reminded that this could be disruptive to society, some told me that they had no obligation to consider whether their political acts threatened the interests of others or social stability. One unemployed female worker said, “I worked in this factory for my whole life. Now I am old and the factory that I devoted my life to kicked me out. Of course I have the right to do anything I can to defend my interests.” Her response to the idea voiced by many others that the SOE reform was a necessary evil was that it was not her business. “My interests were jeopardized by the government and I cannot let this wangbadan [son of a bitch] government off the hook. … I started with leaders in my work unit,” she added. “When they didn’t help me, I went to the local government, and the local government also refused to help me solve the problem. I couldn’t follow the [work unit] leader home to stay [i.e., harass him at home] like some male employees, but I did join the street protests. The government still refused to help me resolve my problem, but at least I made their lives difficult.”¹⁷

Norms prescribe legitimate responses under a particular situation; thus, the impact of culture on people’s choices of political acts is situation-specific. Acts that are not justifiable in one circumstance may become justifiable in another. When I asked those who had chosen not to join protest activities what would compel them to protest, several said they would protest if and when the government threatened society’s collective interests. When I pressed them for a few examples, they named inflation, large-scale corruption of government officials, and police abuse of power.

I hypothesize that cultural norms shape a person’s choices of political acts in the following ways. First, I expect that people under the influence of hierarchical OTA will be more persistent in their activities than those under the influence of reciprocal OTA.¹⁸ This is because (1) they define the purpose of their political activity as remonstrating with government, that is, helping government become aware of its obligation to resolve a problem and (2) their expectations of government are higher than those of people with reciprocal OTA. When people with hierarchical OTA project their normative orientation onto government officials, they assume that the officials will understand their benevolent intentions, and they expect them to respond to their political acts favorably. If the government fails to do so, people with hierarchical OTA are authorized to continue to make their voices heard and to use more strident tactics if their petitions go unanswered. People under the influence of hierarchical OTA may even escalate to confrontational measures with the understanding that their goal is the good of the government and society in general. Thus, we have:

Second, as shown by H4, idiocentric DSI encourages people to participate in politics to guard their private interests. Having made this decision, they are less constrained in their choice of political means by the possible impact of their act on others or on society as a whole. By contrast, the allocentric definition of self-interest compels people to consider the impact of their acts on others and on society. Since confrontational political acts can generate conflicts among actors and create social unrest, people under the influence of allocentric DSI can be expected to avoid confrontational political acts, whereas idiocentric DSI gives normative permission for people to choose such acts. This leads to:

To arrange political acts in China in hierarchical order based on their potential for generating conflict, I conducted a factor analysis of political acts. Four factors emerged, constituting an obvious hierarchy in degree of confrontation.¹⁹ I scored the least confrontational acts 1, the next mostconfrontational acts 2, and so on up to a score of 4 for the most confrontational acts. In Table 6.6, I use ordered logit in HLM to test whether cultural norms influence people’s choice of more confrontational political acts. The same independent variables used in the previous models were used here.

Table 6.6. Cultural Impacts on Choice of Confrontational Political Acts in Mainland China

*** p < .01; ** p < .05; * p < .1

^a Entries are restricted maximum likelihood unstandardized coefficients with HLM 6.06.

^b Entries are robust standard errors.

Note: This analysis is limited to those who perceived government as salient.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183).

The traditionally important sociological resources – education, income, and urbanization – were found to have no impact on people’s choice of more confrontational political acts. Gender made a difference: males were more likely to choose confrontational political acts to pursue their interests than females. The relationship between age and the choice of act appears to be curvilinear; middle-aged people were more likely to engage in more confrontational political acts compared with both the young and the old.

Psychological resources had some effect. Those who were interested in politics and those who believed themselves capable of understanding and participating in politics were more likely to choose confrontational acts. External efficacy had the opposite effect: the more a person saw the government as responsive to his or her demands, the less likely they were to choose confrontational acts. This finding makes sense: people who see the government as responsive to their demands are more likely to expect the government to take care of their needs without their having to take extreme actions. The three institutional variables, political fear, access to media, and grapevine rumors had positive impacts on the likelihood of taking confrontational actions.

For the purposes of this study, the most important finding is that culture has a statistically significant, strong influence over the people’s choices of political acts, a finding that was true for both 1993 and 2002. Consistent with H5, hierarchical OTA increased people’s propensity to engage in confrontational political acts, although it did so only at the county level and not at the individual level in 1993 and at the individual but not the county level in 2002. The high expectations shaped by hierarchical OTA encourage people to engage in political acts to make their voices heard, and the norm further condones using all political means available for the purpose of remonstrating. Consistent with H6, idiocentric DSI at both the individual and the county levels increased the likelihood that people would engage in confrontational political acts.

To compare the degree of impact of cultural norms and interest in politics on people’s choices of political acts, I converted the coefficients of political interest and cultural norms from the logged odds into probabilities and present the results in Table 6.7.

Table 6.7. Comparing the Effects of Culture and Political Interest on the Likelihood of Choosing Confrontational Acts of Participation in Mainland China

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183).

Those who were interested in politics in 1993 were 17.2 percent more likely, and in 2002, 17.3 percent more likely to engage in more confrontational political acts than those who were not interested in politics. DSI, however, appears to have an even larger impact. In 1993, people with the highest idiocentric DSI score were 24.3 percent more likely to choose confrontational political acts than people with the highest allocentric DSI score. In 2002, this gap in likelihood was 20.4 percent. The similarity of the two numbers shows that changes in social structures and political institutions in the intervening years had little effect on the impact of DSI on choice of political acts. The same is true for the impact of DSI at the group level. In 1993, the people living in the most idiocentrically oriented counties were 26.5 percent more likely to engage in more confrontational political acts than people living in the most allocentrically oriented counties, and in 2002 the difference was 20.4 percent. At both the individual and the collective levels, culture remained a strong factor influencing participation, and its influence persisted despite changes in the social and institutional environments.

Culture’s Impacts on Protest Potential

Some students of comparative politics have analyzed a subset of political acts that they label “unconventional political participation.” The category overlaps with but is not identical to the category of confrontational participation, which was analyzed in the preceding section. Unconventional participation consists of acts of public mobilization designed to dramatize demands and challenge the authorities outside the norms of everyday political life, and includes acts like strikes, protests, demonstrations, and riots (Barnes et al. Reference Barnes, Kaase, Allerbeck, Farah, Heunks, Inglehart, Jennings, Klingemann, Marsh and Rosenmayr1979). Although such acts are rare in most societies most of the time, they are potentially important because unconventional participation can influence political stability. Social movement scholars have suggested that economic development can mobilize people to participate in politics, and an explosion in political participation may lead to democratic transition (Nie et al. Reference Nie, Powell and Prewitt1969a, Reference Nie and Powell1969b). Few transitions to democracy, however, have been triggered by explosions of voting, electoral campaign activity, lobbying, and contacting – so-called conventional political participation. Most bottom-up political transitions are sparked by the kinds of activities labeled unconventional political participation.

Rapid economic development and social change in China have led to a rise in social protest and an expectation among many that protest may increase even further. Before the reforms, the government designated work units and other grassroots organizations to distribute resources on behalf of the state. If one person in the organization received a particular state-controlled resource, the chance for other members to get the same resource was reduced proportionately. This institutional design confined most resource competition within grassroots organizations and fragmented the interests of people within a given organization so that large-scale collective action was unlikely to occur (Shi Reference Shi1997). After market reforms, employee interests were no longer tied to the work units. Instead, people’s interests became aligned roughly with social status. Access to jobs, housing, education, health insurance, and other social goods was now determined by government policies at the municipal, provincial, and central levels. Collective action became not only possible but also necessary for resource competition (compare the logic of Barnes et al. Reference Barnes, Kaase, Allerbeck, Farah, Heunks, Inglehart, Jennings, Klingemann, Marsh and Rosenmayr1979, chapter 4).

Because different social groups change positions in a society over time, there are always interests that have not yet gained access to channels of influence, even in democratic societies. Those who have not been co-opted into the regular bargaining processes are thought to be more likely to resort to unconventional political acts to express themselves. Unconventional political actions, therefore, should be more likely to occur in transitional societies where interests are reorganizing (Barnes et al. Reference Barnes, Kaase, Allerbeck, Farah, Heunks, Inglehart, Jennings, Klingemann, Marsh and Rosenmayr1979; Jennings and van Deth Reference Jennings and Deth1990). This line of reasoning by structural theorists predicted an increase in both the level and the scope of unconventional political acts in China.

Moreover, changes brought about by economic reform in Chinese society were destroying the traditional ways in which people participated in politics without establishing new channels of communication for the public to express their opinions and articulate interests. This inadequate representation of a substantial number of people, it was predicted, would push them to engage in unconventional political acts to pursue their interests (Falkenheim Reference Falkenheim1978, Reference Falkenheim, Schulz and Adams1981, Reference Falkenheim and Falkenheim1987; Shi Reference Shi1997). This is the underlying reason why many scholars of Chinese politics predicted that a deepening of economic reform, especially SOE reform, would shake the foundations of the regime and possibly lead to its collapse.

There has been, in fact, a substantial increase in protests in China since the reforms began, and particularly since the turn of the century. In 1995, there were 10,000 collective mass incidents (a category used by the government to refer to such political acts as protests, riots, and mass petitioning). In 2004, this figure rose to 74,000 and in 2005 to 87,000 (Kahn Reference Kahn2006). Yet, given what the regime accomplished through SOE reform over this period of time – laying off more than 20 million workers – the increases in the level and scope of protests seem relatively limited.

Scholars of social movements distinguish between objective and structural opportunities for unconventional political action and the subjective and cultural framing of those opportunities. Although culture does not create opportunities for action, it plays a role in the framing efforts that mediate between objective political opportunities and subjective psychological mobilization (McAdam et al. Reference March, Olsen, McAdam, McCarthy and Zald1996b; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly Reference McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, Lichbach and Zuckerman1997). If cultural norms in China reduce the likelihood of people choosing unconventional political acts, they may help to explain the unexpected stability and resilience of the authoritarian regime in China.

To test this possibility, I followed Samuel Barnes and Max Kaase in studying not unconventional political participation itself but the “propensity” to engage in such acts, which they label “protest potential.” The reason for doing so is that actual participation in unconventional political acts is infrequent and episodic, but the willingness to consider engaging in such acts is a more stable and possibly more widespread attribute. To create this variable, a series of questions was posed, asking respondents whether they approved of people taking each of five unconventional political acts to express their views (following Barnes et al. Reference Barnes, Kaase, Allerbeck, Farah, Heunks, Inglehart, Jennings, Klingemann, Marsh and Rosenmayr1979, chapter 3). People’s attitudes toward unconventional political activities set the boundaries between endorsement and censure and provide us with a measure of their propensity or potential to engage in each form of protest.

The results are presented in Table 6.8. Approval of unconventional political acts was generally low across the population, ranging from 3.5 percent in favor of carrying out a work slowdown in 2002 to 31.7 percent in favor of signing a petition in the same year. Even more noteworthy was the overall decline in approval of unconventional political acts from the earlier to the later date. Except for a rise in the percentage of respondents who approved of signing a petition to express one’s political views, approval of all other forms of protest activity declined.

Table 6.8. Protest Potential in Mainland China (Percent of Sample Approving)

^a The raw frequencies in N columns do not add up to the sample sizes due to missing values.

^b All differences are significant at the .001 level.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183).

What is the role of culture in shaping protest potential? I argued in this chapter that because hierarchical OTA defines the goals of participation as remonstration, people under its influence usually have no intention of overthrowing the government when they choose to engage in political activities but seek to the attention of government to inform and assist the authorities to do a better job, and that they are therefore willing to persist in remonstrating until they feel that they have been heard. I therefore hypothesize:

Definition of self-interest can also positively influence the likelihood that people will approve of unconventional political activities. Most unconventional political activities lead to social unrest. In choosing political acts, people holding idiocentric DSI need only consider whether it can help them achieve their desired goals. Thus idiocentric DSI condones unconventional acts, even if they may pose a threat to social stability or others’ interests. Allocentric DSI, on the other hand, requires actors to consider the impacts of their choices on others and on society as a whole. Even if a political act can help a person to achieve his or her goals, if the act may create societal turmoil, allocentric DSI would not authorize an actor to pursue that choice. We thus have:

It is reasonable to assume that unconventional political actions tend to cluster together: that a person who approves of demonstrations and sit-ins is more likely to approve of signing petitions and engaging in other unconventional participatory activities as well. A factor analysis of the five acts confirmed this supposition. One factor emerged from the model, confirming that all those acts belong to the same dimension. I added them together to create an index of protest potential and used it as the dependent variable in the following analysis.

I then used a hierarchical ANOVA model to partition protest potential, in order to find out if there exists sufficient cross-county variation to warrant HLM. The analysis, not shown here, shows that 90 percent of variance in the protest potential comes from individual level differences, and 10 percent of the variance comes from the county level. This is true for both 1993 and 2002. I thus chose HLM to analyze the data.

As independent and control variables to predict protest potential I used those already established and added two more – relative deprivation and social trust. The idea of deprivation as a motive for unconventional political activities can be traced to Aristotle. He believed that the principal causes of revolution were common people’s aspirations for economic or political equality and the oligarchy’s aspirations for maintaining and increasing economic and political inequalities. Much later, de Tocqueville linked the violence of the 1789 French Revolution to unfulfilled aspirations outpacing objective conditions, thereby increasing overall dissatisfaction and the pressure for change (Tocqueville et al. Reference Tocqueville and Bradley1945 [1835, 1840]). Similarly, Marx saw personal dissatisfaction and the competition between the haves and have-nots as the driving force of history and the ultimate source of political revolt (Marx Reference Marx1967 [1884]). The index of relative deprivation in this model was based on three questions:

1. In light of your individual ability and work achievements, do you think your current income is reasonable or not?

2. Do you think your ability and work get appropriate attention and acknowledgment from your unit leaders?

3. Do you think your ability and work get appropriate respect and recognition in society?

Negative answers were coded as 1 and positive answers as 0. These questions were factor-analyzed and one factor emerged. I added them together to create the index of relative deprivation.

Unlike many conventional political acts, unconventional political actions always require collective effort. To draw the government’s attention, actors need to mobilize others to work together. To do this, the organizers need to overcome the free rider problem (Diani and McAdam Reference Diani and McAdam2003; McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, McCarthy and Zald1996; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001; Olsen Reference Olsen1965; Tarrow Reference Tarrow1994). Scholars have found that social trust plays a critical role in helping to overcome this problem (Putnam Reference Putnam1993). To determine the impact of interpersonal trust on protest potential, I asked respondents whether they felt that most people could be trusted or that people should be cautious when dealing with others. Those who expressed trust were coded as 1. All the others are coded as 0. I included this variable in the model as a control.

Table 6.9reports the results of parallel models for the data collected in 1993 and 2002. We find the sociological and psychological variables working largely as expected, although with some changes from 1993 to 2002. For the study of political culture, the most important finding is that, with all other variables controlled, idiocentric DSI had a statistically significant positive impact on protest potential in both years, as predicted in H8. In 1993, OTA was not found to have any impact; in 2002, consistent with H7, hierarchical OTA at the individual level increased people’s inclinations for unconventional political methods. Structural and institutional changes that took place between the two surveys did not erode the impact of political culture on protest potential and, if anything, served to reinforce it.

Table 6.9. Cultural Impacts on Protest Potential in Mainland China

*** p < .01; ** p < .05; * p < .1

^a Entries are restricted maximum likelihood unstandardized coefficients with HLM 6.06.

^b Entries are robust standard errors.

Source: 1993 Survey of Political Culture and Political Participation in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; 2002 China Survey, Asian Barometer Survey I (1993 N = 3,287; 2002 N = 3,183).

However, there is some evidence of cultural flexibility (Chapter 4). The impact of DSI was statistically significant in 1993 but not in 2002. In 1993, those holding idiocentric DSI expressed themselves as more willing to protest, whereas those holding allocentric DSI were less willing. By 2002, the difference had disappeared. This means that those who held to allocentric norms had redefined the situation, so that their norms – which they still held – no longer constrained them to any greater extent than idiocentric norm holders from expressing approval of protest activities as a potentially appropriate form of action.

Conclusion

Political theories tend to assume that culture’s impacts on political participation are unidirectional, that is, that traditional culture makes people more passive in politics, while modern culture mobilizes them to participate. This chapter showed that this was not the case in China. It is true that the traditional, allocentric definition of self-interest made people politically passive and encouraged them to refrain from confrontational and unconventional political acts. But hierarchical OTA made people more likely to blame their government, made them more active political participants, and made them more likely to engage in confrontational and unconventional political activities. Failure to differentiate the alternative impacts of different dimensions of traditional culture on people’s political behavior can lead researchers to the wrong conclusions about cultural impacts on political participation.

These findings shed light on the puzzle of authoritarian resilience in China. People holding allocentric DSI are less likely than those with idiocentric DSI to hold government responsible for solving their problems, to participate in politics (even if their problems require government intervention), and to join confrontational activities, including social movements to oppose the government. The prevalence of this cultural norm gives the Chinese government valuable space for promoting policies that will jeopardize the interests of a substantial number of people but that are claimed to benefit society as a whole in the long run.

Another dimension of traditional culture, hierarchical OTA, confines the goals of participation to remonstration and sets the threshold extremely high for activism against the government. While the norm does not prevent people from engaging in unconventional political activities, the impacts of those activities, when aimed at remonstration, can be fundamentally different from the impacts they produce in other cultures. By providing the government more policy-making freedom, increasing the public’s general tolerance of the government, and setting a higher threshold for opposition to the government, traditional culture makes a societal-led transition to democracy more difficult in China than elsewhere.

Even if traditional culture constitutes a barrier to democratic transition, some believe that both traditional culture itself and its impacts on people’s political behavior will change as a consequence of social and economic development. This argument suffers from two problems. First, it assumes that structural and institutional changes make people update their cultural orientations according to a new incentive structure, that is, that a cultural process of “becoming modern” is inevitable, ignoring other possibilities. Second, it focuses exclusively on cultural discontinuity, ignoring pattern-maintaining change and cultural flexibility.

My analyses, however, call these assumptions into question. I found that culture, operationalized as norms, was more stable than previously conceived, even by political culture scholars. Rather than making people abandon traditional cultural norms, structural and institutional changes in China motivated a substantial number of people to re-embrace traditional culture. Moreover, culture’s impacts on participation were not linear and one-dimensional. Instead, different dimensions of cultural norms had different impacts on people’s participatory behavior. While idiocentric DSI encourages people to engage in various political acts, including unconventional ones, another dimension of modern culture – reciprocal OTA – discourages people from engaging in political acts to pursue their goals. Even if the modernization process can lead to a cultural shift, as suggested by structural and cultural theorists, it may not always lead to a participation explosion.

Finally, even when people with different cultural norms engage in the same political activities, their goals for those activities will usually be fundamentally different. People holding hierarchical OTA may pursue unconventional acts to remonstrate with their rulers, while reciprocal OTA authorizes unconventional political activities to oppose the government. The political consequences of each are likely to be fundamentally different. While social movements initiated by people with reciprocal OTA can be a major threat to the regime, the same activities by people with hierarchical OTA may not pose any danger. Until cultural norms change in China or alter the way in which they affect political behavior, democratic transition is unlikely to be triggered by pressure from below.