Term Limits and Authoritarian Power Sharing: Theory and Evidence from China

Abstract

Term limits that effectively govern leadership transition play an important role in authoritarian power sharing. A fixed term and a pre-appointed successor— two crucial components of term limits institution — commit the incumbent ruler to share power with other elites, and also allow the elites to monitor and coordinate against the ruler’s transgression of the power sharing agreement. While the successful adoption of term limits often requires an even balance of power among the ruling elites in the first place, once adopted, it initiates an evolving bargain over allocation of political power among multi-generations of leaders that further keeps any one faction from dominating the others. I corroborate this argument using a biographical dataset of Chinese Communist Party’s elite members from 1982 to 2012. The findings suggest the Party’s incumbent leaders and their rivals (i.e., predecessor and heir-apparent) shared equal chances in promoting their associates — which proxy their political influence, and such pattern becomes more salient since the 16th party congress, when the term limit institution that currently governs China’s leadership transition became fully fledged. This result also sheds light on the role of informal, patronage-based promotion in the institutionalization of authoritarian politics.