Vacancy Chains as Strategy: Inter-Administration Mobility of Political Elites in Reform China

Shilin Jia
University of Chicago

Bigger picture

  • Black box of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s elite politics
  • Raw Data: Huge volumes of high-level Chinese political elites’ CVs
  • RQ: What can we say about the careers of CCP elites? And what can we say about the CCP’s staffing strategy?
  • Analytic strategy: Computational & organizational analysis

Perspectives

Two perspectives for studying mobility of elites

  • Individual perspective
    • views mobility from the perspective of the individual who moves through positions
    • important factors: human capital (merit), social capital (connections), structural opportunities
  • Organizational perspective
    • views mobility from the perspective of the organization responsible for filling positions, e.g. institutionalism
    • Our perspective: “Structure follows strategy” (Chandler 1990: 14)

Our central claim

  • Individuals’ careers cannot be studied as independent when they are endogenously generated by the organization.
  • We bring in organizational strategy to explain career patterns and success.

Vacancy Chains

How careers appear in CVs

How careers are generated

Let’s switch perspectives

  • People cannot freely move inside a system, but vacancies can (White 1970)

Research Design

Data

  • Source: CVs of political elites of the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) (http://cped.nccu.edu.tw/)
  • Who are they?
    • Chinese political elites who have reached the level of vice-minister or vice-governor after 1966 (N ~ 4000)
    • ~ 11.7k job entries
  • Period: 1978-2011
  • Method: computer-assisted coding

Computer-assisted coding

  • Goal: Recognizing the organizational unit (provincial or functional) where job entries took place

  • At least 8 rounds of manual examination of the results via sampling (N = 100 each)

  • Error rates estimated from the most recent sample check:

    • 3%, 17 missed and 7 wrong in 948 jobs of 100 people. 5 missed (false negatives) and 2 over-coded (false positives) in 51 transfers

Computer-assisted coding

Why inter-organizational transfers?

  • Internal hires: specialization
  • External hires: integration

Isolated vs. chained transfers

Tracking vacancy chains

  • Predecessors and successors must occupy the exact same posts
  • Maximum vacancy window: 6 months
  • Fuzzy match followed by manual checks by me and 3 research assistants
  • All chains and isolated transfers are complete.

White (1970)’s original assumption

  • Vacancy chains as Markov chains

Key distinction of our study

  • Isolated transfers
    • more likely initiated by locals on ad hoc bases
  • Chained transfers
    • more likely orchestrated by the state and part of a strategy

Bigger Story

China’s transition to market economy

Organizational perspective

  • Departure point: Soviet planning system as a giant factory organized by central planning agencies
  • Decentralization as a solution (Chandler 1990; Fligstein 1985) and M-form transformation (Xu 2011; Qian and Weingast 1996, 1997)
    • Piecemeal transition, a ”dual-track” system (Naughton 1995; Shirk 1993)
    • Centrifugal force: decentralization (Landry, 2008); regional protection and bureaucratic fragmentation (Lieberthal 1992; Li and Bachman 1989)
    • Centripetal force: personnel management (Landry, 2008; Naughton and Yang 2004; Xu 2011)

CCP’s organizational strategy

  • nomenklatura (职务名称表)
  • reserved cadres (后备干部) and “third echelon” (第三梯队)
  • long-planned sponsorship through orchestrated transfers

Vacancy chains as strategy

Findings

Simultaneous replacement of vacancies

Longer chain lengths over time

Markovian analysis

  • Null hypothesis: Long chains were successions of independent isolated transfers
    • Where a vacancy visits next only depends on where it currently is
  • We can calculate expected chain lengths based on
    • observed initial vacancies plus
    • estimated transitional probabilities (parametric) or
    • simulations via random walks (non-parametric)

Orchestration: Longer lengths than expected by chance

Expected chain lengths under Markovian models

More lateral transfers in vacancy chains

chain length demotion (%) lateral (%) promotion (%)
1 3.2 56.5 40.3
2 4.6 62.2 33.2
3 6.8 63.4 29.8
4 10.7 60.5 28.8
5 5.1 67.7 27.2
  • Administrative ranks
    • -1: No.1 person 一把手 (e.g. provincial party secretary, minister)
    • -1.5: No.2 person (e.g. governor, standing deputy minister)
    • -2: All positions at the vice-governor/deputy-minister level
    • -3: All sub-province/ministry-level positions

Where do vacancies start and where do they terminate?

  • In early periods, vacancies start in ministries and terminate in provinces
  • In later periods, vacancies start in provinces and are less likely to terminate.

Where do vacancies visit?

  • Centripetal force
    • The central state tries to penetrate its subunits through external transfers via vacancy chains
  • Centrifugal force
    • Powerful local strongholds (e.g. Shanghai and Guangdong) try to internally absorb their vacancies as much as possible

Estimating organizational ranks through organizational hieararchy

  • Not all organizations are equal even when administrative ranks are the same.
  • Hierarchy of organizations can be observed through transfer patterns (Padgett 1990).
  • The hierarchy should be the most salient at the very top level (admin rank = 1) where competition for limited number of posts is extremely fierce.

Estimation

  • Assumption: head(unit \(i\)) \(\rightarrow\) head(unit \(j\)) implies \(i \leq j\) where the arrow means a top-level lateral transfer.
  • Ranking provinces and ministries through network triangularization (Jia and Xu 2018; Schiavinotto and Stützle 2005)

Validation

  • Alternative method: Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model
    • produces very similar rankings (corr > 0.9 )
  • Org ranks correlate with provincial per capita GDP at 0.6~0.7

Vacancy chains tend to start in high-ranking places, cascade downwards, and terminate in high-ranking places

They tend to terminate in high-ranking provinces

But not high-ranking ministries

Terminal probability by per capita GDP rank

Per capita GDP quintile 1 2 3 4 5
1978-1991 0.44 0.3 0.5 0.62 0.59
1992-2001 0.42 0.44 0.31 0.63 0.58
2002-2011 0.37 0.35 0.28 0.47 0.48
All 0.4 0.37 0.32 0.54 0.53

Let’s switch to the individual perspective

What happened to the elites involved in these transfers?

  • Suppression hypothesis: VCs transferred powerful elites out of their local bases
  • Sponsership hypothesis: By moving people (presumably pre-screened officials on reserved-cadre lists), VCs put them into faster career tracks

Short-term tradeoff

  • Mean des-ori org rank differential by admin rank differential by decade
    decade 1978-1991 1992-2001 2002-2011
    demotion 0.43 0.42 0.3
    lateral 0.19 0.06 0.09
    promotion -0.09 -0.13 -0.2
  • Higher trade-off for chained transfers (regression not shown)

Long-term benefit

  • The involved elites can also expect that their coming stops are not their final destinations but stepstones for further career advancement

Hypothesis: everything else being equal, an official involved in a longer chain should have a brighter future than his counterpart.

Regression

  • Unit of analysis: transfer-person
  • DV: Whether the person involved in a transfer is promoted in the next Party Congress.
    • Party rank: The ultimate rank of power in the CCP
      1. None
      2. Alternate Central Committee (ACC)
      3. Central Committee (CC)
      4. Politburo (PB)
      5. Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC)
  • IV: VC Length
  • Control:
    • Transfer-level characteristics
    • Person-level characteristics and special connections

Weak correlation with existing human and social capital variables

Results

VC effects with matching

Temporal effects

Summary

  • As China transitioned into decentralized market economy, the Party employed orchestrated vacancy chains to transfer its trusted elite members through a wide range of subunits
    • Strong provinces were, to some degree, more able to shield themselves
  • The strategy worked because elites involved in vacancy chains, in general, benefited from the transfers through either getting promotions or moving to better places
  • The VCs put those elites into strategic positions, not only for the present, but also for the future.

Can we theorize above the Chinese case?