Jie Lu and Tianjian Shi, Political Experience: A Missing Variable in the Study of Political Transformation

How do people in authoritarian societies respond to the introduction of semicompetitive elections? Conventional wisdom suggests that once elections are introduced into an authoritarian society, people will quickly grasp the newly available opportunity to pursue their interests. The responses of people in rural China to the introduction of village elections seem to be different from what this conventional model assumes. Many peasants hesitated to vote when elections were available for the first time in their political lives. A two-stage political learning model captures people's responses to electoral reform, and survey data collected from China at both the individual and village levels in 2002 examine the model’s validity.