Linking the State and Farmers:Party Building,Administrative Embedding and Grassroots Elections——An Empirical Analysis Based on the Fight against Poverty Project
Poverty alleviation serves as a strategic initiative to enhance the grassroots governance by the Party building,in the process of which the Party,government and rural society interact with each other,thereby profoundly influencing the grassroots elections.According to the analytical framework of the tripartite interaction among the Party,government and rural society,the resource input,administrative embedding,and Party building are identified as three mechanisms for the poverty alleviation to exert its influence on the grassroots elections.Based on data from the 2018 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey and employing a continuous difference-difference design to conduct the effect evaluation,this study has found that the poverty alleviation program generally increases the voter turnout in grassroots elections,which has a political effect on promoting the democratic governance in villages.Mechanism analysis reveals that the poverty alleviation decreases the voter turnout to some extent through the mechanisms of resource input and administrative embedding,while significantly increasing the turnout through the mechanism of Party building,and the intermediary effect of Party building is more substantial than the former two.In conclusion,the Party building in poverty alleviation plays a pivotal role in linking the state and farmers,and effectively drives the grassroots democratic governance.