Doctoral Dissertation Research - Behavioral Traits and Political Selection in Authoritarian Ruling Parties

长期以来，学者和政策制定者对一党政权政治稳定背后的机制感兴趣。由于威权执政党在人事管理方面与企业有许多相似之处，越来越多的文献研究了人事选择在威权执政党的持久性和生存中的作用。然而，在研究威权政党精英的行为和党内人员选拔策略时，现有文献只关注情境因素的作用，如环境和结构约束，以及任务绩效。个人层面的性格因素和行为模式在选举政治和企业管理的研究中得到了充分的讨论，但在威权主义文献中却被忽视了。该项目挑战了权威主义政党精英具有单一性格属性的假设，以及情境因素和任务绩效在权威主义人事选择中起主导作用的命题。这个项目认为，风险倾向，一个主要的行为特征，在个人层面上，有深刻的行为后果，在党的精英？服从领导，执行政策。同时，威权政党也根据干部的行为特征对其进行管理和分配。本项目以中国共产党为研究案例，为新兴的威权执政党文献做出了贡献，并拓宽了我们对非民主背景下政治行为的认识。该项目还提供了关于中国共产党干部行为特征和结果的原始数据，在中国，政治精英数据是众所周知的难以获得。该项目通过整合原始的定量和定性证据，为我们理解威权执政党提供了帮助。本研究设计并实施了一项针对1000 - 2000名参加中国重点大学证书课程的中层党员干部的原创性调查实验。该调查旨在通过采用各种风险倾向的措施，调查实验，功能启动线索的不同方面的职业生涯的不确定性，和一系列的认可实验测量的行为特征和党的干部的意见。同时，本研究亦将收集不同行为特质干部的分布数据，并利用这些数据来了解中共的人事管理策略。为了补充定量数据，将对在职和退休的党的高级干部进行一系列访谈，并收集档案数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Mechanisms behind the political stability of single-party regimes have long interested scholars and policymakers. As authoritarian ruling parties share many similarities with corporations regarding personnel management, a growing body of literature examines the role of personnel selection in durability and survival of authoritarian parties. When examining behaviors of authoritarian party elites and strategies of intra-party personnel selection, however, the existing literature exclusively focuses on the roles of situational factors, such as environmental and structural constraints, and task performance. Dispositional factors and behavioral patterns at the individual level, which have been thoroughly discussed in research on electoral politics and firm management, have been overlooked in the authoritarianism literature. This project challenges the assumption that authoritarian party elites have monolithic dispositional attributes and the proposition that situational factors and task performance play dominant roles in authoritarian personnel selection. This project argues that risk propensities, a major behavioral trait at the individual level, have profound behavioral outcomes in party elites? obedience to the leadership and policy implementation. Meanwhile, authoritarian parties also manage and assign the cadres based on their behavioral traits. Using the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a research case, this project contributes to a burgeoning body of literature on authoritarian ruling parties and broadens our knowledge of political behavior in non-democratic contexts. This project also presents original data on behavioral traits and outcomes of party cadres in China, where political elite data are notoriously difficult to obtain.This project sheds light on our understanding of authoritarian ruling parties by incorporating original quantitative and qualitative evidence. This project designs and implements an original survey experiment among 1,000-2,000 medium-level CCP party cadres who participate certificate programs at a major university in China. The survey seeks to measure behavioral traits and opinions of party cadres by employing a variety of measures of risk propensities, survey experiments that feature priming cues about different aspects of career uncertainties, and a series of endorsement experiments. In the meantime, this project will also collect distributional data of cadres with different behavioral traits and uses the information to understand the CCP's personnel management strategies. To supplement the quantitative data, a series of interviews will be conducted with serving and retiring senior party cadres and collect archival data.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.