Social Ties and the Selection of China’s Political Elite

We study how sharing a hometown or college connection with an incumbent member of China’s Politburo affects a candidate’s likelihood of selection as a new member. In specifications that include fixed effects to absorb quality differences across cities and colleges, we find that hometown and college connections are each associated with 5-9 percentage point reductions in selection probability. This “connections penalty†is equally strong for retiring Politburo members, arguing against quota-based explanations, and it is much stronger for junior Politburo members, consistent with a role for intra-factional competition. We show that our findings differ sharply from earlier work both because of our more rigorous empirical specification as well as our emphasis on shared hometown and college – rather than shared workplace – connections.