MOVING BEYOND FACTIONS: USING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS TO UNCOVER PATRONAGE NETWORKS AMONG CHINESE ELITES

• Published in: Journal of East Asian studies Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 17 - 41
• Main Author: Keller, Franziska Barbara
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.03.2016; 동아시아연구원
• Subjects: Alliances; Chinese languages; Colleagues; Elite (Social sciences); Game theory; Patron and client; Patronage; Political alliances; Political aspects; Political elites; Political leadership; Political parties; Political science; Politics; Power; Qualitative research; Researchers; Social network analysis; Social networks; Social structure; 지역학; China; New York; United States > US; elite politics; China; social network analysis; central committee; network centrality; power; patronage; informal institutions; factions; Communist Party
• ISSN: 1598-2408; 2234-6643
• DOI: 10.1017/jea.2015.3

Informal connections play an important role in regimes all across the world, but among China's political elite, it is particularly factional affiliation that is said to structure contention over who will rule and who will fall victim to a purge. This article identifies two approaches to measuring factional ties in the literature: the exploratory approach traces alliance ties through qualitative assessment of insider sources, while the structured approach uses publicly available data to infer factions from shared characteristics. The article combines the two by arguing that informal politics is better conceptualized as a process of alliance formation shaped by an underlying social (network) structure. Among the structured approaches, coworker networks best capture the latter, but this can be further refined by noting the number of instances of working together, or by taking into account promotions that have occurred while the two individuals were coworkers.