How a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy over time: A study of changes in Chinese Communist Party legitimacy after 1949

Abstract

By exploring the operation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its rise to power in 1949, this article demonstrates how a non-democratic regime maintains its legitimacy. While previous studies have shed light on the CCP’s sources of legitimacy, few abundantly and comparatively discuss the different forms of legitimacy and how legitimacy changes over time in a non-democratic state. This study addresses these gaps by analyzing how the CCP’s operational principles change over time, including changes in sources and forms of legitimacy. This study uses different frameworks of legitimacy to facilitate the comparison of changes in legitimacy of different leadership generations, and also demonstrates the specification of legitimacy of the CCP from different perspectives. By comparing the sources and forms of legitimacy of different generations of regime leaders, this study demonstrates that after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the CCP regime lacked substantial legitimacy based on political participation, and thus emphasized instrumental legitimacy based on economic development instead. Using process tracing to analyze policy changes, this study argues that different CCP leadership generations employed different sources and forms of legitimacy to maintain regime support.