Chinese People's Congresses and Legislative Embeddedness: Understanding Early Organizational Development

Evidence from medieval Europe and modern China suggests that cooperation with strong executives plays a larger role in early legislative development than is generally acknowledged: that under conditions of absolutism (or near-absolutism), acceptance and exploitation of subordination may be a means to organizational development. In this article, the author relies primarily on interview data and Chinese field research to show that early legislative development can occur without significantly increasing conflict with established authorities and without winning autonomy. The author further argues that legislative embeddedness, as measured by clarified and expanded jurisdiction and increased capacity, is a product less of conflict than of executive support and attention, and that support and attention in the early stages of organizational development can be understood in terms of a legislature's presence, its reliability and usefulness, and the political standing of its leaders. The article's conclusion offers a new approach to early legislative development that shifts attention from conventional measures of institutionalization and hinges on understanding the process of embeddedness.