A Rural-Urban Divide? Reassessing Voting in Chinese Villagers’ Committee and Residents’ Committee Elections

Abstract

While Chinese scholars, media, and writers have long reported a noteworthy rural-urban difference in political participation, the meaning of this divergence to China’s local democracy remains underexplored. This paper explores the different patterns of electoral participation between rural and urban residents. I argue that the rural zeal in elections is due to VC governments’ strong capacity to mobilize loyalists to vote in state-controlled elections, while voter apathy in urban elections is resulted from the RC governments’ lack of the equivalent power to cultivate loyalist voters. Using Chinese General Social Survey 2013 to test the argument, I find evidence that shows that in VC elections rural people are more likely to vote in state-controlled elections than are urban residents. In addition, villagers’ electoral participation has nothing to do with their democratic consciousness but is significantly associated with Party membership. In contrast, urban turnout is highly correlated with democratic consciousness but not Party membership.