Daniel Koss: Where the Party Rules – The Rank and File of China’s Communist StateCarolin Kautz

ASIEN – Nr. 154/155 (2020) pp. 178–80

Cambridge University Press, 2018. XVI + 391p.
74.99 GBP (hardback), 26.99 GBP (paperback), 28.00 USD (ebook)

With his recently published monograph, Daniel Koss offers an important contribution to the study of authoritarianism. By using China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a case study, Koss analyses “the party’s role in the information architecture of the authoritarian state, with implications for state capacity and ultimately for regime durability as well” (p. 6). Koss wants to go beyond existing approaches in the literature that focus on the role of authoritarian parties as institutions of patronage, for mediating leadership conflicts and as democratic concessions in an authoritarian context (p. 6). Instead, he suggests the use of an authoritarian lens for the study of authoritarian regime parties in order to understand how they function and how they serve to empower the state. In order to do this, Koss uses his case study of the CCP to move beyond analyses either of the top-level leadership or of making comparisons on a cross-national scale and instead, with the help of a sub-national comparative approach, analyses the distribution of the CCP’s rank and file and their contributions to empowering the state. Koss argues that rank-and-file party members of the CCP help to empower the state by fulfilling the function of providing information crucial for political tasks…