Village Elections in China: Cooperation between the State and the Peasantry

Village elections, as a policy response to developmental problems in rural China in the 1980s, were not designed to promote democracy in China. The process of village elections, however, has served as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry over the last decade. To understand why an authoritarian regime introduced an electoral process to its countryside and why this electoral process of village elections has served as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry over the last decade, we should try to understand where the congruence between the state and the peasantry was in this form of cooperation, what the role of the state was in this process, and what the implications of this electoral process for democracy were in China. The process of village elections might eventually have a benign result that was not originally envisioned by its sponsor, but little progress has been made in that direction over the last decade. Putting village elections in such perspective, this paper examines the economic, political and democratic dimensions of this electoral process of village elections as a new form of cooperation between the state and the peasantry.     

Village Citizenship in China: A Case Study of Zhejiang

This paper aims to examine the idea and practice, as well as the implications, of village citizenship in China. It spells out the context and content of village citizenship, describes struggles for village status, and addresses the puzzling questions of why and how villagers seek to retain this status. It further examines the logic of how such struggles are leading to the establishment and improvement of village democratic institutions. The paradoxes and problems associated with village citizenship, and the significance of village citizenship for achieving meaningful citizenship are also explored.     

发展基层民主 助推中国腾飞

基层民主是全中国经济社会发展的动力源泉，也是中国发展的引擎。基层民主实践主要表现在农村基层民主、城市基层民主、党内基层民主、企业民主四个层面，基层民主实践为中国发展培训了理性的发展主体，奠定了安定有序的社会环境，并为人们提供了广阔的创新试验大舞台。     

村落选举、公共性生产与合法性——以陕西Y村为例

转型期中国乡村基层村庄民主选举备受学界关注,学界分别从乡村治理、制度变迁、政治民主等角度考察这一问题。然而这些考察忽略了一个重要维度:乡村公共性主题。笔者认为这一主题才是乡村选举的实质和意涵。通过Y村选举及修路等涉及村落公共事务的个案,笔者考察当前村落选举与村庄公共性生产、村落公意和共识的关系,文章认为当前基层乡村依然延续了差序式的公共性生产模式。这种公共性生产模式与通过选举运作生产公共性的模式之间具有内在张力,正是这种张力导致试图透过西式选举达成村落公意和民众共识的设想在重建当代乡村公共性实践中遇到问题。     

Policy Deliberation as a Goal: The Case of Chinese ENGO Activism

Since it was first introduced in the late 1990s, the concept of deliberative democracy has had policy appeal for both Chinese policymakers and scholars. The Chinese government has recently introduced various deliberative institutions in a top-down manner to address diverse governance challenges. Deliberation at the level of civil society, however, has remained largely limited under the Chinese authoritarian regime setting. This paper illustrates how Chinese civil society actors have increasingly exerted bottom-up pressure to attain a greater degree of deliberation, transparency, and accountability in policymaking, by using the case of a series of anti-dam campaigns conducted by environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) over the past decade. Throughout their campaigns, ENGOs have urged both the central and local governments to adopt more participatory and transparent policymaking and examine the potential social and environmental impacts of large dams. They have done so particularly by invoking the very laws and policies that the government has recently introduced. This study suggests that future research on deliberative democracy in China should pay greater attention to non-state actors and their roles in practicing and promoting bottom-up deliberation.     

Deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance: a case study of one deliberative experimental in China

Deliberative democracy requires a new type of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance. However, there has been little examination of the connection between deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance. Moreover, despite a growing literature that has examined a diversity of concepts of Chinese citizenship, the newly emerging deliberative citizenship has not been studied. This paper attempts to fill these two gaps by studying the role of deliberative citizenship in deliberative governance practice. Drawing on an experiment this author organized in 2010, this article examines the question of whether deliberative citizenship can be harnessed to solve a particular social problem and how deliberative forums can become a new form of deliberative governance mechanism. It examines what kind of conditions help or hinder the development of deliberative citizenship and deliberative governance, and identifies the limitations of local deliberative democracy in China.     

Empathy in a Citizen Deliberation Experiment

Despite increased scholarly attention, there is still limited knowledge on how empathy works in democratic deliberation. This article examines the role of empathy in citizen deliberation with the help of a deliberative experiment on immigration. First, a random sample of citizens was surveyed regarding their opinions on immigration. Based on their opinions, they were then divided into a permissive or a non‐permissive enclave, and randomly assigned into like‐minded or mixed‐opinion groups for deliberation. After deliberation, they were surveyed anew. The study analyzes: (a) empathy differences between permissive and non‐permissive participants; (b) changes in outgroup empathy toward immigrants as a result of deliberation; and (c) differences in prosocial behavior (i.e., donating to charity). The results show that the permissive respondents had more empathy, especially toward immigrants, than the non‐permissive respondents. Among participants, outgroup empathy increased during deliberation. Regarding prosocial behavior, the permissive participants donated more often to charity at the end of the experiment.     

富人治村与乡镇的治理逻辑

当前普通农业型村庄的富人治村状况和乡镇治理能力表明,当前的富人治村与传统社会的乡绅治村截然不同,前者更多的是一种行政逻辑,很少积极主动地回应村庄内部的治理需求;后者则是一种自治逻辑,是基于乡村社会内生秩序与治理需求的考虑。相应地,依赖富人治村的乡镇治理逻辑已不再是与传统乡绅治村相适应的简约治理逻辑,而是一种治理逻辑,即依赖富人治村只是乡镇应对其治理能力衰弱,以实现各类行政和治理目标的策略。     

New Developments in Deliberative Democracy

This paper inspects recent theoretical work in deliberative democracy. It identifies three distinct ways in which such theories attempt to justify their claims for an increase in deliberation. Each has its strengths; each has its implications for practice. If the new deliberative theories are to move beyond a critique of liberal democracy in order to articulate a legitimate and practical politics, the respective gains of these three types must be brought together.     

Why Village Election Has Not Much Improved Village Governance

Journal of Chinese Political Science - Village elections have been implemented throughout China for more than a decade. Much improvement has been made in the institutionalization of village...     

Citizens' Juries and Deliberative Democracy

In the face of widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary democratic practice, there has been a growing interest in theories of deliberative democracy. However theorists have often failed to sufficiently address the question of institutional design. This paper argues that recent experiments with citizens' juries should be of interest to deliberative democrats. The practice of citizens' juries is considered in light of three deliberative democratic criteria: inclusivity, deliberation and citizenship. It is argued that citizens' juries offer important insights into how democratic deliberation could be institutionalized in contemporary political decision-making processes.     

Fear's Anger: Virginia Woolf's Psychology and Deliberative Democracy

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resistance that is part of reasoning in a deliberative system—especially when political deliberation results in a challenge to a person's identity. Woolf's solution for women writers, the material security represented by a room of one's own, can be applied to the larger problem of political deliberation as well. This leads to an expansion of the conception of substantive equality required for a deliberative democracy. Further, Woolf's insight challenges deliberative democrats to de-center capitalist economic relations. As a way of protecting the individual from the psychological dynamic Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own, deliberative democrats should advocate a non-competitive economic space for those threatened by the powerful psychological reactions to deliberation.     

Word and Deed: A Deweyan Integration of Deliberative and Participatory Democracy

This article draws on the political philosophy of John Dewey as one way to re-think the relationship between deliberative and participatory democracy. Rather than focusing on differences, Dewey's ideal of democracy allows us to bridge these two theories while still being attentive to the tensions between them. In particular, Dewey helps us conceptualize deliberative and participatory practices as distinctive yet complementary phases within a larger circuit of cooperative inquiry. To illustrate the argument, a case study of one democratic experiment that effectively combined different forms of practice is presented. In doing so, it is contended that we might be able to recover and incorporate some of the more radical features of participatory democracy into deliberative practices. Participatory theory's focus on political action and structural inequality, in addition to deliberation, as essential to citizen-centered democratic practice is specifically emphasized.     

Democratization,International Knowledge Institutions,and Global Governance

The central problem of democracy has long been theorized as how to place appropriate constraints on the responsible exercise of power. Today, this problem is most acute in global governance. This article examines the rapid rise in the creation of international knowledge institutions, arguing that these institutions reflect a growing effort by nations and publics to assert democratic constraints on the on the global exercise of power through their ability to structure processes of reasoning and deliberation in global society. Specifically, the article argues for the need to attend carefully to processes of knowledge‐making in international institutions, including the roles of international institutions in setting standards for the exercise of reasoning, their contributions to the making of global kinds through their work in classifying and reclassifying the objects of international discourse, and through their roles in opening up and constraining participation in international deliberation. The article concludes that the construction and deployment of policy‐relevant knowledge are a significant source of power in their own right in global governance that need to be subject to their own democratic critique.     

Representation,Participation or Deliberation? Democratic Responses to the Environmental Challenge

The environmental question poses four challenges to democracy: global justice, intergenerational justice, the value of non-human species and technocratic decision-making. This article discusses these challenges in the light of three values or dimensions of democratic theory: representativity, participation and deliberation. It is found that even, if participation and deliberation by a broad set of actors are crucial to integrate democratic decision-making and environmental concern, there is also a need for representative institutions at all levels of society. The democracy–environment relation is not just about values and ideas. It also requires global, international, regional, national and local institutions armed with power resources.     

Legitimacy Problems in Deliberative Democracy

The classic accounts of deliberative democracy are also accounts of legitimacy: 'that outcomes are legitimate to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation by all those subject to the decision in question' ( Dryzek, 2001 , p. 651). And yet, in complex societies deliberative participation by all those affected by collective decision-making is extremely implausible. There are also legitimacy problems with the demanding procedural requirements which deliberation imposes on participants. Given these problems, deliberative democracy seems unable to deliver legitimate outcomes as it defines them.
Focusing on the problem of scale, this paper offers a tentative solution using representation, a concept which is itself problematic. Along the way, the paper highlights issues with the legitimate role of experts, the different legitimate uses of statistical and electoral representation, and differences between the research and democratic imperatives driving current attempts to put deliberative principles into practice, illustrated with a case from a Leicester health policy debate. While much work remains to be done on exactly how the principles arrived at might be transformed into working institutions, they do offer a means of criticising existing deliberative practice.     

Why we should not believe every lesson Andrew Moravcsik teaches us: A response

This article is a response to Andrew Moravcsik’s “What Can We Learn from the Collapse of the European Constitutional Project?”, published in No. 2, Vol. 47 (2006) of the PVS. In our reply we focus on three main points. First, we argue that Moravcsik’s apologia of the status quo does not convince in light of the challenges that a European Union currently with 27 member states and increasing heterogeneity is facing. Second, we discuss his causal chain model linking participation, deliberation and political legitimacy. We argue that Moravcsik confuses causality with conditionality. By doing so, he exaggerates claims of normative political science about the causal relationship between participation, deliberation and legitimacy, and makes it an unjustifiably easy target for critique. Third, we critically examine Moravcsik’s notion of democracy in order to show that his view of democracy as guaranteeing “certain social goods” brings about the risk of producing a theory of democracy without democracy.     

Is small beautiful? Village level taxation of natural resources in Tanzania

This article examines collection of natural resources revenue by village governments in Tanzania as part of a decentralisation reform. An analysis of empirical data in the form of taxation records from 14 villages, which collect and retain revenues on natural resources utilisation suggests that decentralising revenue collection to the lowest local government tier may yield: (i) considerable increases in revenue collection; (ii) increased transparency in public finances through requirements that village governments document their incomes and expenditures to the villagers; and (iii) a financial surplus that is used to finance public services at the village level. The evidence presented in this article suggests that decentralising taxation to the lowest local government tier may be a viable approach to enhance revenue collection on the utilisation of relatively low value natural resources, and assure that a share of the collected revenue is used to finance public services. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pragmatism and Radical Democracy

Abstract

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning.