Authoritarian deliberation and government control

• Main Author: Qin, Xuan
• Other Authors: Christopher Holman
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Political science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87648; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46778
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

China has introduced various deliberative experiments since the 2000s. Different from their counterparts in most liberal democracies, Chinese deliberative innovations are functionally driven by the government to maintain social stability and enhance public trust. “Authoritarian deliberation,” a term coined by Baogang He and Mark Warren, has been widely used to describe this specific form of deliberation. The existing literature on Chinese deliberative democracy has largely focused on local deliberative innovations such as deliberative polling and participatory budgeting, but has overlooked a form of nationwide deliberation: participatory pricing. This thesis aims to fill the gap by offering an empirical study on it. The thesis is presented in a three-article format. The first article explains participatory pricing’s emergence in the dynamics of state-market relations and clarifies its authoritarian essence as a cunning control mechanism. The subsequent two articles use quantitative methods with new data to reveal the mechanism that underlies the government’s motivation and the participants’ responses. The thesis concludes that, at least for the short term, this mechanism will successfully improve public support, strengthen authoritarian rule in China and reinforce the existing political system.