Social Ties and the Selection of China's Political Elite

Transcription

1 Social Ties and the Selection of China's Political Elite Raymond Fisman, Jing Shi, Yongxiang Wang, and Weixing Wu Abstract We examine the role of social ties in the selection of China's Politburo, the country's highest governing body. We obtain the counter-intuitive nding that hometown and college ties are negative predictors of selection: after controlling for candidate birth city and college xed eects, hometown and college ties are each associated with 6-10 percentage point reductions in selection probability. This eect is stronger under Mao, consistent with anti-factionalist sentiment as a contributing factor, and is weaker for connections to senior Politburo members, consistent with competition within groups for leadership positions as a second factor contributing to the observed connections penalty. JEL classication: D72; P26 Keywords: Social Networks, Political Connections, Political Elite, Politburo, China 1

2 1 Introduction We study the selection of ocials into the Central Politburo (hereafter Politburo), the most powerful body in the Chinese government. Beyond the direct importance of understanding what determines the top leadership of the world's most populous nation (and second largest economy), studying elite political selection in China may provide insights into the selection of high-level ocials in non-democracies more generally. The Politburo's members are selected every ve years from among the members of the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party (hereafter the Central Committee), whose membership in turn is drawn from the top ranks of provincial ocers, top military leaders, and central government ministers. While the Central Committee is nominally responsible for electing the Politburo (much as individual citizens are nominally responsible for electing Chinese ocials at lower levels), in practice the Politburo itself is thought to have a decisive role in selecting new members (see, for example, Li (2008)). In our paper, we examine whether Central Committee members with connections to incumbent Politburo members are more likely to be elected to the next Politburo, using data from the post-war period. There is, ex ante, reason to expect that such ties may provide a leg up in the Politburo selection process. For example, in writing about selection of the 17th Politburo, Shirk (2012) observes that it was commonly perceived that Politburo selection, revolve[s] around the distribution of seats among personalistic factions the networks of loyalty between senior political gures and the ocials who have worked with them, are from the same region or studied at the same university and who have risen through the ranks with their patrons. We focus on several forms of connections, alluded to in the preceding quote, that have wellestablished precedence in earlier work: hometown (i.e., prefecture) ties, college ties, and past employment relationships. 1 Our favored specications include xed eects for hometown, college, and work history. While this specication absorbs any advantage that a particular group may exploit to maintain a steady representation on the Politburo, by identifying the value of connections via (time-varying) Politburo turnover, we can control eectively for quality dierences across groups (for example, by far the most commonly represented college among Politburo members is Tsinghua University, also China's most prestigious school; we return to this issue in Section 3). We nd, counterintuitively, that both hometown and college ties lead to a much lower probability of Politburo selection. For hometown ties, in our favored specication which includes hometown xed 1 Recent studies that examine the benets of these types of connections in China include Cai (2014), Heidenheimer and Johnston (2011), Shih et al. (2012), Jia et al. (2015), Wang (2016), and Shih and Lee (2017) who explore their role in promotions in the Chinese bureaucracy, and Fisman et al., (forthcoming) who study their role in election to the Chinese Academies of Science and Engineering. 2

3 eects and a range of individual controls a Politburo connection reduces the likelihood that a Central Committee member is elected by 6.1 percentage points, a 52 percent decline relative to the baseline election rate. For college ties, the comparable gure is an 8.9 percentage point reduction in election probability. We observe no detectable eect of workplace ties on Politburo selection (likely because standard measures of workplace ties are too noisy to detect any eect). Our results stand in sharp contrast to the positive role of connections documented in earlier work (see Cai (2014) for a book-length treatment), which focused largely on promotion at lower levels of the Chinese bureaucracy, indicating that dierent possibly more stringent standards govern selection at the upper echelons of government. Overall, our results indicate that, at least for the highest and most visible levels of the Chinese polity, connections may reduce the chances of promotion. While at rst blush counterintuitive, the connections penalty is consistent with the forceful anti-factionalist stance of China's post-war leader, Mao Zedong, who argued that it was harmful to both the collective and the individual if one chose to support another simply because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. 2 In addition to its prominence in Mao's rhetoric, anti-factionalism was written into the Communist Party's constitution during the Seventh National Congress in June 11, When we divide the sample into the Mao and post-mao eras, we nd that the negative eect of hometown connections on selection is stronger under Mao, consistent with the anti-factionalist rhetoric in the earlier part of our sample being at least partly responsible for the overall connections penalty we observe (the college tie eect also stronger under Mao, but the dierence between the two periods is small and insignicant). We consider several further explanations for our main result. First, as suggested by earlier research on factional power sharing (Shih et al. (2012)), if incumbent Politburo members wish to ensure that no single faction grows too strong, opposing coalitions may block powerful hometown or college groups from gaining additional members (inter-group competition). We do not, however, nd any dierential eect of connections for the hometown or college with the largest representation among incumbent Politburo members. Second, as emphasized by Francois et al. (2016), incumbent Politburo members may wish to maintain their dominant position within a group network (in our setting, the hometown or college network) and thereby block potential challengers from within their own group (intra-group competition). This explanation would apply less to Politburo Standing Committee (henceforth PSC) members, who sit higher up in the hierarchy than other Politburo members. Consistent with intra-group competition, the negative eect of hometown ties comes only from connections to non-psc members (we observe a more negative eect of college ties to non-psc 2 From The Collected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume II, translation obtained from 3 See in particular the General Principles, and also Article 23 of Section 1. 3

4 members, but the magnitude of the non-psc college tie eect is very similar to that of PSC college ties). Finally, we explore whether the negative connections eect involves geographic quotas for the Politburo, i.e., eorts to ensure that no single area benets from disproportionate representation. However, we nd no eect of ties based on birth province. If geographic quotas were responsible for the negative eect of hometown ties, one would expect to see a negative home province eect, since the central government primarily controls province-level (rather than prefectural) appointments and hence has greater need to show impartiality at the province level. 4 Second, quotas are less plausibly responsible for the negative college tie eect for which, to our knowledge, there has never been any discussion of quota allocation, even informally. We contribute to the literature that aims to understand the selection of ocials in China specifically, and in non-democracies generally. In prior work on China, the evidence on the role of favoritism has been mixed. Most recently, Francois et al. (2016) study the benets of factional ties for promotion within the Communist Party. They nd a benet from factional connections to the General Secretary, the highest-ranking position in the Chinese government, but also a tendency for factional power sharing at lower levels. This work builds on related earlier work by Shih et al. (2012), who similarly nd that individuals with factional ties to top ocials via hometown, college, or workplace ties have an advantage in promotion. We view our work as complementary to these earlier studies which, owing to their data and emphasis, tend to focus more on lower-level promotions (in particular from the rank of Alternative Central Committee to Central Committee membership) rather than accession to the Politburo. This dierence, along with our more inclusive measure of connections to any Politburo member (rather than the highest-ranked individuals), may account for our apparently contradictory ndings. Furthermore, as will become apparent in our analysis, accounting for hometown and college xed eects is crucial to examining the eects of (time-varying) connections, since some hometowns and educational institutions tend to produce many more high-ranked ocials than others. We view this additional aspect to our empirical analysis to represent an advance on prior work, enabled by the richness of our connections data and the length of our panel. 5 Our work also links to a larger body of research on the determinants and consequences of promotional structures throughout the Chinese hierarchy. Jia et al. (2015), for example, report a complementary eect of connections and performance in determining provincial leaders' promotions, 6 4 In the Chinese administrative hierarchy, provinces are under the direct control of the central government, while municipalities are under the direct control of provincial leaders. See, for example, Chung (1995). 5 Furthermore, as Francois et al. (2016) emphasize, workplace ties may be a problematic measure of connections because of the endogeneity of promotion of faction members through the hierarchy. This creates a potential problem for the analysis of Shih et al. (2012), which aggregates all connection types. We view this particular concern as less likely to apply to college ties and especially hometown ties. 6 We do not observe any eect of performance whether directly or conditional on connections in our own data, 4

5 while Persson and Zhuravskaya (2015) explore the role of promotions and thus career concerns in governing the policy choices of provincial leaders (Kung (2014), in his analysis of grain distribution during the Great Famine, shows in particular how such promotional concerns can misre). Our work also contributes to our understanding of the role of connections in China more broadly, linking to the vast literature on guanxi ties (for recent empirical examples see Fisman et al., (forthcoming) on the role of connections in election to the Chinese Academies of Science and Engineering, and Kung and Ma (2016) on the value of connections for small business growth). 2 Background and data 2.1 The organization of the Chinese polity The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (Central Committee) is a political body that comprises the top leaders of the Communist Party. Its members are elected at the convening of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, under the guidance of the Politburo. While the number of Central Committee members uctuates from term to term (and has grown over time), it has had approximately 200 members in each term since the early 1970s. The Central Committee's membership is comprised of national leaders, chief ocers at institutions that are under the direct control of the Central Committee (e.g., the Organization Department, the Propaganda Department), heads of ministries under the control of the State Council (China's chief administrative body), provincial governors and party secretaries, chief military ocers, and leaders from eight People's Organizations (e.g., the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist Youth League) who also hold the rank of minister. The Central Committee meets at least annually, to discuss and rene formal government policies. The de facto leadership of the government resides within the Politburo, a collection of approximately 25 top leaders selected from the membership of the Central Committee at its rst convening, which takes place immediately following the National Congress. In most terms, a small number of replacement members were also elected during later Central Committee meetings to replace Politburo members lost to death, removed due to corruption, or purged for political reasons (especially during the Cultural Revolution). Other than the twelfth term ( ), during which ten members retired and were replaced by six new members, the number of mid-term replacements is generally very small. Throughout, we will include all Politburo members selected at any point during a term as new members, and will code their connections based on the composition of the Politburo at the time of selection. but provincial leaders represent only about a fth of our sample. 5

6 While the Central Committee is nominally responsible for electing the Politburo, according to Li (2008), the notion that the Central Committee elects the Politburo is something of a ction. (In fact, the Politburo selection follows a single candidate election rule, whereby there are no more candidates than available seats, so once the slate is chosen, the Central Committee acts as a rubber stamp.) Li goes on to suggest that Politburo members themselves (particularly those on the Standing Committee) hold sway in the selection process. The power of the Politburo manifests itself in a number of ways. Most importantly, higher levels of government generally direct the selection of candidates at lower levels, giving the Politburo control over the choice of provincial leaders. Additionally, given the relative infrequency of Central Committee meetings, the direction of China's central government is largely left up the Politburo and in particular members of its Standing Committee, who are selected from among the Politburo's membership. 2.2 The role of social ties in Chinese politics Guanxi is the network-based system of favor exchange that plays a central role in political, economic, and social life in China, which is often built on social connections, including hometown ties, work ties, college ties, family ties, and mentor-mentee relationships. We focus on hometown, college, and workplace ties both because of their prominence in establishing guanxi and also because they are observable albeit subject to measurement error based on readily obtainable biographical information (see Shih et al. (2012) and references therein). Following earlier work, we do not require temporal overlap for college or hometown connections (similarly, research using college ties in the U.S. as a proxy for social ties does not emphasize concurrent enrollment for a connection to exist (see, for example, Cohen et al. (2010)). In the case of workplace ties, we do require that two individuals overlap in their period of employment in order to qualify as connected. Even with this restriction, given the very similar career trajectories for those selected as Central Committee members (and hence eligible for Politburo selection), well over half of candidates are coded as workplace-connected; if no temporal overlap were required, the gure would rise to above 90 percent. Guanxi relates very directly to the notion of factionalism that so concerned Mao Zedong as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party and to Chinese society more broadly. Mao's anti-factionalist writings and rhetoric dates at least to the late 1920s, when he led a regiment of the Red Army. For example, in a 1929 article Mao mentions Xiao Tuanti Zhuyi (small group mentality) as a form of individualism that was corrosive to the interests of the collective. 7 Mao's strong anti-factionalist 7 See On correcting mistaken ideas in the party, contained in The Collected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume I. Mao continued to inveigh against factionalism through the 1930s. See, for example, the speech we quote in the 6

7 stance set the tone for future leaders. Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, carried the torch of antifactionalism forward, vociferously denying that he or Mao were ever associated with any faction and, like Mao, Deng spoke out against factions as impediments to party unity. 8 These anti-factionalist principles have led to explicit government rules and restrictions, especially in more recent years. Concerns of in-group favoritism led the government to impose rules, dating back to at least the early 1990s, that aim to prevent local ocials from favoring those from their home regions. Overall, we take the narrative surrounding political selection in China's post-war years to be ambiguous on the question of favoritism via social ties. On the one hand, the central government itself has acknowledged the continued role of social ties as a source of favoritism, which is why the aforementioned strictures are in place. And indeed despite his vehement denials, Deng himself was accused by some as being aligned with a Mao faction. At the same time, given Mao's forceful anti-factionalist rhetoric and perhaps the resulting desire to set an example (despite the absence of any formal restrictions on Politburo selection), connections may plausibly have been a liability rather than an advantage in Politburo selection. 2.3 Data Our analysis requires background information on the full set of Central Committee members (including the small subset that are Politburo members). Our starting point for developing this database is the website maintained by the Communist Party of China, which includes Central Committee lists going back to its seventh term ( ). Background information on these individuals including place of birth, year of birth, and detailed education and work history may be found via the Political Elites of the Communist Part of China database maintained by the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Our outcome measure throughout is Elected it, an indicator variable denoting that candidate i was selected for term t of the Politburo. As noted in Section 2.1, while almost all new Politburo members are selected at the Central Committee's rst meeting, replacement members may also be chosen at mid-term meetings. We set Elected it = 1 for all individuals elected during term t regardless of when during the term they are selected. While Politburo members at term t 1 are eligible for membership also at term t, we omit them from our analysis, as they are generally reelected unless of retirement age. We also use these data to generate measures of connectedness of Central Committee members introduction, which was made in See, for example, Deng's 1989 speech, We must form a promising collective leadership that will carry out reform, reprinted in The Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Volume III. 7

8 (who comprise the full set of eligible Politburo candidates) to incumbent Politburo members. Consider rst our measure of connectedness based on hometown ties. The candidates for term t of the Politburo include members of the Central Committee during term t 1. We dene candidate i for Politburo term t to be hometown-connected (HometownT ie = 1) if there exists at least one Politburo member at term t 1 (and hence in the Politburo when selection of the term t Politburo takes place) who is from the same prefecture as i. HometownT ie can be measured from the eighth term ( ) onward, since we require lagged observations of the Politburo to calculate connections of candidates to incumbent members. Our data end with the eighteenth term ( ). We similarly construct CollegeTie based on Central Committee and Politburo members' undergraduate institutions, for the eighth through eighteenth terms. When analyzing the eects of college ties, we include only the 1361 candidate-term observations for individuals with a college degree (68.9 percent of the full sample) to avoid confounding the eect of college ties on selection with the eect of having a college degree. For workplace ties, we require that Politburo candidates and Politburo incumbents have a period of overlap in their work histories, more specically a period of time in which both worked in the same department in the same prefecture. While no single position within the Central Committee guarantees Politburo membership, some positions tend to be elected at much higher rates than others. We therefore include controls for whether a Central Committee member is a military ocer (Military); an indicator denoting that an individual is the party secretary of one of the directly-controlled municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, or is the party secretary of Guangdong (4_Leader s) since these are positions that have most commonly (but by no means always) seen representation in the Politburo; an indicator variable for provincial leaders (Province); and to account for political dynasties we include the variable Princeling, which captures whether any of the candidate's parents or parents-in-law ever served in the Politburo. We also include hometown, workplace, and college xed eects to capture average dierences in the rate of Politburo selection as a function of these background characteristics. Our data include 1143 distinct candidates, 565 of whom appear only once in our data. A substantial number also appear as candidates twice (382 individuals) and three times (147 individuals). We dene PriorCandidacies as the number of previous terms an individual appeared as a (non- Politburo) member of the Central Committee. We control for prior candidacies throughout, given the higher likelihood of success for longer tenured Central Committee members. Appendix Table A1 provides summary statistics on the main variables we employ in our main analysis. 8

9 3 Results Before turning to regression analyses, we present a series of gures to explore the patterns in the raw data. In Figure 1, we show the fraction of Central Committee members that are elected to the Politburo as a function of their college connections. We include only college graduates, to avoid merely pick up the eect of having a college degree. We present this comparison in the left panel, which shows a higher rate of Politburo election among college-connected candidates (9.6 percent versus 6.8 percent for unconnected candidates). However, a large fraction of the sample nearly two-thirds of college-educated candidates graduated from schools with no connections throughout the entire period. And as we noted in the introduction, this leads to diculties in interpreting the full sample results: while it is possible that the higher rate of selection among connected candidates may indicate that colleges with more frequent representation on the Politburo are able to exploit those connections to maintain relatively steady representation, it may also be the result of unobserved quality dierences across colleges. The concern over quality dierences is underscored by a comparison of colleges with frequent Politburo ties versus those with no Politburo representation at all. For example, by far the most common college of attendance in the post- Mao era is Tsinghua University (24 members, or 16.7 percent of the sample), also China's most prestigious university. 9 Peking University the country's second-ranked school produced the second-most Politburo members (8, or 5.6 percent) since The pool of Central Committee candidates is dominated by individuals from elite schools, though less so than the Politburo 6.3 percent of Central Committee members attended Tsinghua, 4.7 percent attended Peking University, and more broadly elite universities are over-represented. Overall, the patterns in the data suggest that there is positive selection on education as one rises through the bureaucracy, and hence a need to try to control for it. To mitigate concerns of unobserved quality dierences across colleges, we omit the neverconnected college graduates in the right panel of Figure 1, leading to a lower selection rate for connected candidates: 9.6 percent, versus 13.1 percent for unconnected candidates. By including college (or hometown or workplace) xed eects, we will identify the eect of ties from the rotation of individuals on and o the Politburo, which we argue deals eectively with concerns of unobserved quality. Figure 2 shows the analogous patterns for hometown ties. The left histogram, which compares the election rates of candidates with and without hometown ties to the incumbent Politburo members for the full sample, shows that the selection probability is near-identical for candidates with and without hometown ties (7.4 versus 6.9 percent respectively). When we omit candidates 9 Far fewer Politburo members were college educated prior to Tsinghua is still the dominant college of Politburo members if we use the entire sample. 9

10 from hometowns that have zero hometown ties throughout the entire sample period (48 percent of all observations) in the right panel, hometown connections are associated with a lower chance of Politburo selection: 7.4 percent, versus 11.8 percent for those without hometown connections. Since our analysis will emphasize less the role of workplace ties, we relegate the comparable gure for workplace ties to the Appendix, in Figure A1. In the left histogram we observe consistent with prior research that workplace ties are very strongly correlated with election: Politburo election rates are 9.4 percent versus 3.0 percent for those with and without workplace ties respectively. To focus on workplaces with a reasonable amount of within-workplace variation in connections, we omit workplaces with W orkt ie = 0 throughout the sample and also those that are almost always connected (W orkt ie = 1 for at least 85 percent of observations). This reduces the sample by 44.5 percent. When we compare election rates in this subsample, the gap between connected and unconnected candidates narrows to 6.3 versus 2.9 percent. This narrowing indicates that some workplaces may simply produce individuals destined for high-level leadership positions, rather than serving as a source of favoritism between incumbent and prospective Politburo members. Again, we will take advantage of the rotation of individuals with dierent workplace experiences on and o the Politburo to more clearly identify the role of connections when we proceed to our regression results. 3.1 Main regression results In Table 1 we present results that explore the relationship between connections and Politburo selection, including a range of controls. Our specications all take the following form: Elected it = β Connection c it + γ c + ω t + ɛ it (1) where Elected it is an indicator variable denoting that Central Committee member i was elected to the Politburo for term t. Connection c it denotes that candidate i was connected to at least one incumbent Politburo member via connection type c {HometownT ie, CollegeT ie, W orkt ie}. For each type of connection, we include a full set of xed eects for the source of the tie. So when we measure connections by hometown ties we include 264 hometown xed eects; similarly, we have 391 college xed eects for the college tie specication, and 289 workplace xed eects for the workplace tie specication. 10 It is because of the large number of xed eects in each case that we consider each type of connection separately (the correlation among connection types is low, so that examining each connection type separately is less of a concern than it otherwise might be: the correlation 10 We include xed eects for all city-department combinations for which there exists at least one overlap in the workplace histories of a Politburo member and a Central Committee member. 10

11 between HometownTie and WorkTie is 0.056, while ρ(hometownt ie, CollegeT ie) = and ρ(w orkt ie, CollegeT ie) = 0.074)). ω t is a term xed eect, and ɛ it is an error term clustered at the candidate-level. In column (1), we use HometownTie as our connection measure; we generate results that are in line with those shown in the right half of Figure 1: hometown-connected candidates are 7.7 percentage points less likely to be selected as Politburo members (p-value < 0.001). In column (2) we use CollegeTie as our measure of connections and again nd a negative impact on Politburo election, of 10.1 percentage points (signicant at the 5 percent level). In column (3), with WorkTie as the connections measure, we nd a precisely estimated near-zero eect, and can reject at a 95 percent condence level a positive work tie eect of greater than 3 percentage points. This may be because of the relative unimportance of work ties on average, or because our proxy for workplacebased networks is too coarse. (Francois et al. (2016), for example, look at the Shanghai Gang of ocials who worked in the Shanghai municipal bureaucracy in some capacity, highlighting the exceptionality of the Shanghai political machine. 11 ) In columns (4) (6) we include a set of controls, including log(age), PriorCandidacies, 4_Leader, Provincial, Military, and Princeling, as well as a set of education dummies indicating completion of a college, master's, and doctoral degree. The inclusion of these covariates do not aect our estimates of the eect of hometown and college connections on Politburo selection. The coecient on HometownTie in column (4) implies a 6.1 percentage point reduction in the probability of Politburo selection (signicant at the 1 percent level). Relative to the selection base rate of 11.8 percent for HometownT ie = 0 candidates (from hometowns with variation in this variable), our estimate implies that a hometown tie reduces a candidate's election probability by 52 percent. The coecient on CollegeTie in column (5) implies an 8.9 percentage point reduction in the probability of Politburo selection, a very large impact given the base rate of election of 13.1 percent for CollegeT ie = 0 candidates (who graduated from colleges with some variation in CollegeTie). 3.2 Potential mechanisms While our focus is documenting the counterintuitive and quantitatively large negative eect of connections on Politburo selection, in this section we oer some tentative results to assess several possible explanations for the connections penalty. We focus on hometown and college ties, given the lack of any discernable eect of workplace ties. We dene an indicator variable Mao to denote elections for terms 8-11 (i.e., elections up to and including 1977). We present in Table 2 specications that parallel those in our main results, 11 When we look at the eect of Shanghai Gang connections using the denition of Francois et al. (2016), we estimate a negative eect, though very imprecisely measured. 11

12 with the interaction Mao Connection added for each of hometown and college ties. In column (1), which includes only hometown xed eects as controls, the direct eect of HometownTie, which captures the eect of hometown ties in the post-mao era, drops by a third relative to its size in Table 1 (signicant at the 5 percent level). The coecient on the interaction term Mao HometownT ie is negative and nearly twice as large as the direct hometown eect. The outsized eect of hometown ties under Mao is further amplied when we add individual-level controls in column (3). While there are potentially multiple explanations for the stronger negative eect of hometown ties in the Mao = 1 period, we argue that it is broadly consistent with the view that under Mao, with his very public anti-factionalist stance, the political elite may have been particularly attuned to concerns of in-group favoritism. In columns (2) and (4) we show the results for college ties. While the coecient on Mao CollegeT ie is negative in both cases, the estimates are small relative to the direct eect, and imprecisely estimated. Table 3 disaggregates hometown and college ties to provide some tentative evidence on the roles of inter- and intragroup competition. The role of intergroup competition is suggested by earlier research on factional power sharing (e.g., Shih et al. (2012)), which argues that dierent factions within the Chinese polity aim to balance the power held by individual groups or networks. Interfactional competition may imply that coalitions of incumbent Politburo members would block the candidacies of already-powerful hometown or college groups from gaining yet more Politburo members. We operationalize this prediction by comparing the eect of connections to members of the most-represented group among incumbent Politburo members to the eect of connections to other Politburo incumbents. We dene the indicator variable Largest City Tie to denote candidates who share their hometown with the most commonly represented hometown among Politburo incumbents. We analogously dene Largest College Tie for ties to the most prevalent college among Politburo incumbents. In the rst two columns of Table 3, we present results that allow the eect of hometown and college ties to dier for the largest group of each type. In both cases, the coecients are very similar for the variables capturing ties to the largest group and all other groups, which appears inconsistent with the intergroup competition view. We next explore whether the negative eect of connections results from Politburo members working to maintain their dominant position within a group network (as modeled by Francois et al. (2016)) by blocking potential challengers from within their own network ( intragroup competition). If this is a primary reason for our empirical result, it should be attenuated among more senior members of the Politburo, who will be less threatened by new (more junior) members. To capture the dierential eect of seniority, we disaggregate our connections measure to look at ties to Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) members versus other (non-psc) Politburo members. We present these 12

13 results in the second pair of columns in Table 3. Looking rst at hometown ties, in column (3) the coecient on PSC hometown ties close to zero, whereas the coecient on non-psc ties is large (-0.072) and signicant at the 1 percent level. We can reject equality of the PSC and non-psc hometown tie coecients at the 10 percent level. For college ties (column (4)), while the PSC tie coecient is again closer to zero than the non-psc tie coecient, the dierence is small and the two are statistically indistinguishable from one another. Overall, Table 3 provides no evidence in favor of intergroup competition and mixed evidence on intragroup competition. Finally, we consider whether the negative impact of connections on election at least for hometown ties derives from geographic quotas: in an attempt to ensure that no single area benets from disproportionate inuence, the government's top leadership may avoid selecting candidates from regions already represented in the Politburo. To examine whether this is a likely explanation for the negative hometown tie result, in Appendix Table A2 we examine the relationship between home province ties and Politburo selection. In China, the central government has direct control over provincial leadership positions, while provincial leaders control municipal appointments. Given this hierarchy, if there were reason for the central government to demonstrate equitable treatment regionally it would most plausibly operate at the provincial level. Table A2 presents variants on specication (1), using HomeprovinceTie as our measure of connections. In columns (1) and (2) we present specications that use only HomeprovinceTie as a measure of connections, and include home province xed eects. The point estimate on HomeprovinceTie, while negative, is small in both cases and not statistically signicant. In columns (3) and (4) we include HometownTie as a covariate. Once we account for birth city, the coecient on HomeprovinceTie is positive, though small and not statistically signicant. These results cast doubt on the geographic quotas explanation for our ndings, because historically such quotas formal or otherwise within the Chinese central government bureaucracy operate at the province-level. Overall we take the results in this section as providing tentative support for two possible explanations for the connections penalty the stronger eect during the Mao years is consistent with rich historical evidence on the role of Mao's anti-factionalist views in making top leaders averse to selecting Politburo members that might risk the appearance of in-group favoritism. The stronger eect for ties to lower-level Politburo members is consistent with intragroup competition. 4 Conclusion In this paper we document that, among candidates for China's Politburo, those with hometown or college ties to incumbent Politburo members are less likely to be elected. Our results are of note in part because we provide, to our knowledge, a rst attempt at systematically linking social 13

14 connections to election at the highest levels of the Chinese government. Our analysis is also of signicance because it enriches the body of evidence on connections and promotion in ways that stand in sharp contrast to much conventional wisdom, as well as extant work on the determinants of promotion at the lower echelons of China's government. Our main analysis and ndings emphasize also the care required in analyzing observational data on connections we document clear evidence that particular hometowns, colleges, and workplaces tend to produce large numbers of elite politicians. As a result, cross-sectional analyses may be biased toward nding a positive eect of connections when none exists. Finally, while we provide some intriguing evidence of potential underlying explanations for the connections penalty, it is based on cross-sectional correlations that should be viewed as suggestive. This is a topic that we hope will see further research in the future. 14

15 References Cai, Y. (2014). State and agents in China: Disciplining government ocials. Stanford University Press. Chung, J. H. (1995). Studies of centralprovincial relations in the people's republic of china: A mid-term appraisal. The China Quarterly 142, Cohen, L., A. Frazzini, and C. Malloy (2010). Sell-side school ties. The Journal of Finance 65 (4), Fisman, R., J. Shi, Y. Wang, and R. Xu (Forthcoming). Social ties and favoritism in chinese science. Journal of Political Economy. Francois, P., F. Trebbi, and K. Xiao (2016). Factions in nondemocracies: Theory and evidence from the chinese communist party. Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research. Heidenheimer, A. J. and M. Johnston (2011). Political corruption: Concepts and contexts, Volume 1. Transaction Publishers. Jia, R., M. Kudamatsu, and D. Seim (2015). Political selection in china: The complementary roles of connections and performance. Journal of the European Economic Association 13 (4), Kung, J. K.-s. (2014). The emperor strikes back: Political status, career incentives and grain procurement during china's great leap famine. Political Science Research and Methods 2 (2), Kung, J. K.-s. and C. Ma (2016). Friends with benets: How political connections help to sustain private enterprise growth in china. Economica. Li, C. (2008). From selection to election? experiments in the recruitment of chinese political elites. China Leadership Monitor 26, 67. Persson, P. and E. Zhuravskaya (2015). The limits of career concerns in federalism: evidence from china. Journal of the European Economic Association. Shih, V., C. Adolph, and M. Liu (2012). Getting ahead in the communist party: explaining the advancement of central committee members in china. American Political Science Review 106 (01), Shih, V. and J. Lee (2017). Predicting authoritarian selections: Theoretical and machine learning predictions of politburo promotions for the 19th party congress of the chinese communist party. 15

16 Shirk, S. (2012). China's next leaders: a guide to what's at stake. New York Times, Wang, P. (2016). Military corruption in china: the role of guanxi in the buying and selling of military positions. The China Quarterly 228,

17 Figure 1: College ties and Politburo Election Rates Mean Election Rate Full Sample Var(CollegeTie)>0 Sample CollegeTie=0 CollegeTie=1 Notes: Each bar provides the mean election rate to the Politburo for a group of Central Committee members. The bars on the left are for the full sample of eligible Central Committee (non-incumbent Politburo) members. The bars on the right exclude candidates from colleges that are never connected. In each set, the white bars show the average election rate for candidates who did not attend the same college as any incumbent Politburo member, while the gray bars show the average election rate for candidates who attended the same college as at least one incumbent Politburo member.

18 Figure 2: Hometown ties and Politburo Election Rates Mean Election Rate Full Sample Var(HometownTie)>0 Sample HometownTie=0 HometownTie=1 Notes: Each bar provides the mean election rate to the Politburo for a group of Central Committee members. The bars on the left are for the full sample of eligible Central Committee (non-incumbent Politburo) members. The bars on the right exclude candidates from hometowns that are never connected. In each set, the white bar shows the average election rate for candidates who do not share their hometown with at least one incumbent Politburo member, while the gray bar shows the average election rate for candidates who do share their hometown with at least one incumbent Politburo member.

19 Table 1: Politburo Ties and Candidate Election Probability (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Dependent Variable Elected to Politburo HometownTie (0.023) (0.021) CollegeTie (0.045) (0.041) WorkTie (0.013) (0.013) log(age) (0.049) (0.100) (0.046) Prior Candidacies (0.009) (0.015) (0.008) Provincial (0.018) (0.026) (0.017) Military (0.014) (0.029) (0.017) 4 Leaders (0.097) (0.098) (0.082) College (0.013) (0.013) Master (0.019) (0.028) (0.017) Doctor (0.032) (0.042) (0.026) Hometown FE Yes Yes College FE Yes Yes Workplace FE Yes Yes Observations R-Squared Notes: Standard errors clustered by candidate in all regressions. For variable definitions see Appendix Table A1. Significance: * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%.

20 Table 2: Politburo Ties and Candidate Election Probability, Mao vs. post-mao eras (1) (2) (3) (4) Dependent Variable Elected to Politburo HometownTie (0.026) (0.024) CollegeTie (0.050) (0.045) Mao*HometownTie (0.043) (0.040) Mao*CollegeTie (0.068) (0.065) log(age) (0.048) (0.101) Prior Candidacies (0.009) (0.015) Provincial (0.018) (0.026) Military (0.014) (0.028) 4 Leaders (0.097) (0.097) College (0.013) Master (0.020) (0.028) Doctor (0.032) (0.042) Hometown FE Yes Yes College FE Yes Yes Observations R-Squared Notes: Standard errors clustered by candidate in all regressions. For variable definitions see Appendix Table A1. Significance: * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%.

21 Table 3: Effect of PSC Ties and Influential Groups on Selection (1) (2) (3) (4) Dependent Variable Elected to Politburo Largest City Tie (0.062) Non-Largest City Tie (0.022) Largest College Tie (0.073) Non-Largest College Tie (0.043) PSC City Tie (0.035) Non-PSC City Tie (0.023) PSC College Tie (0.050) Non-PSC College Tie (0.043) Hometown FE Yes Yes College FE Yes Yes Observations R-Squared Notes: Standard errors clustered by candidate in all regressions. In column (1) the two listed covariates are indicator variables denoting hometown ties to the hometown with the largest number of Politburo members in that term versus all other hometowns. In column (2) the two listed covariates are indicator variables denoting college ties to the college with the largest number of Politburo members in that term versus all other colleges. In columns (3) and (4) we disaggregate hometown and college ties into connections to Politburo Standing Committee members versus other Politburo members. Significance: * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%.