Dimitar D. Gueorguiev

China's Governance Puzzle: Enabling Transparency and Participation in a Single-Party State

China is widely viewed as a global powerhouse that has achieved a remarkable economic transformation with little political change. Less well known is that Chinas leaders have also implemented far‐reaching governance reforms designed to promote government transparency and increase public participation in official policymaking. What are the motivations behind these reforms and, more importantly, what impact are they having? This puzzle lies at the heart of Chinese politics and could dictate Chinas political trajectory for years to come. This extensive collaborative study not only documents the origins and scope of these reforms across China, but offers the first systematic assessment by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the impact of participation and transparency on important governance outcomes. Comparing across provinces and over time, the authors argue that the reforms are resulting in lower corruption and enhanced legal compliance, but these outcomes also depend on a broader societal ecosystem that includes an active media and robust civil society.

Language politics, education, and ethnic integration: the pluralist dilemma in Singapore

ABSTRACT Governments of ethno-linguistically diverse societies face a difficult dilemma in opting for which language to use in the education system. While allowing each ethnic group to use its own language is seen as vital for cultural preservation and increasingly as a basic human right, it may also inadvertently undermine social cohesion by contributing to de facto segregation of schools. But does educational segregation really beget social segregation, especially in the presence of opportunities for inter-ethnic contact beyond schools? Using social network data from Facebook, we leverage a unique feature of Singapore’s education system to examine that question. We find that alumni from four de facto segregated secondary schools do have less ethnically diverse social networks than their peers from comparable but integrated schools, even years after graduation. This effect exists despite the multitude of intrusive public policies designed to induce inter-ethnic integration beyond the education system in Singapore, suggesting that schooling plays a particularly pronounced role in the identity formation process.

We Asked You: Public Opinion and Consultation in China

China’s leaders describe their system of rule as “consultative democracy”, whereby the public, forbidden from organizing on matters of politics, is encouraged to participate on issues of policy. In particular, citizens are routinely solicited for input on upcoming policy debates. But are public inputs incorporated into policy outputs or is it all ‘window-dressing’? In pursuit of an answer, we employ an online survey designed to measure public preferences on a range of policies recently debated by China’s National People’s Congress (NPC). Next, we compare final policy decisions, based on whether or not they were opened for public consultation, for evidence of convergence between public opinion and policy choices. Our findings suggest that consultation is associated with more popular policy choices. To check for robustness, we pair our measures of policy preference with latent measures of ideology from our survey, and outside surveys, to extrapolate a predicted ’public opinion’ for the broader Chinese constituency. While we cannot discount the possibility that topics were selectively opened to public input, closer examination of public opinion distributions does not support this interpretation.