Political Participation and the Vietnamese Communist Party

Abstract

The concept of political participation is central to any comparative study of politics because it addresses the crucial question of how citizen activity is related to public policy, power, and legitimacy. The Chinese Communist Party's concept of political participation originated in that of the Soviet Union but acquired some distinctive features on the road to power. The Vietnamese Communists on achieving dominance in the North in 1954 announced neither a people's democratic dictatorship nor a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Vietnam Fatherland Front, which absorbed the National Front for the Liberation of the South after the war, remains as as ever. The Vietnamese have had no Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution and have looked askance upon these experiments. In Vietnam the active political minority appears to affirm the regime's values more enthusiastically than the people, but what needs to be studied is how this affirmation affects the minority's, or the Party's behavior.