Agricultural Practices and Voting Behaviours: Evidence from Chinese Village Committee Elections

Cong Wang, Ding Li and Zhihang Zou

Journal of Development Studies, 2025, vol. 61, issue 8, 1294-1316

Abstract: Chinese agricultural practices, particularly the dichotomy ‘southern rice and northern wheat’, has a profound impact on voting behaviours in village committee elections. Drawing on micro-level data sampled from CFPS 2014, this paper reveals that rice-cultivation regions have engendered a collectivist culture through shared irrigation and collaborative labour among kins and neighbours, resulting in higher levels of voting participation. Conversely, the wheat-cultivation regions have nurtured an individualistic culture through independent irrigation and harvesting practices, leading to lower levels of voting participation. The rice-wheat pattern contributes to a 27 per cent disparity in the probability of voting participation between the two regions. This finding remains robust even after considering the historical movement of the rice-wheat boundary and their mixed cultivation with other arid-field crops spanning millennia. Further utilising data from value surveys, this paper constructs indicators to substantiate the ‘collectivism/individualism cleavage’ channel. The crucial insight gleaned from this discovery is that reintegrating traditional culture into modern society represents a more effective approach to enhancing rural governance than its elimination.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2024.2420028

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