Despite the increasing academic interest in how the party exerts control, there has been little research on how individuals or entities resist such control. This article provides an up-to-date ethnographic account of the evolving relationship between homeowners’ associations (HoAs) and the party-state in China. Drawing on interviews and archival research, I find that while the party-state attempts to penetrate the homeowner self-governance institution, homeowners in China have exhibited increasingly direct and effective resistance to the party’s efforts in three ways, including evasion, collective petitions, and legality reviews. My research underscores the potential of homeowners to defend their right to self-governance from party infiltration in today’s increasingly authoritarian China.

Chapter 4 examines how collaboration varies across issue area and policy substance. Dear Colleague letters are classified into one of twenty issue areas based on the comparative agendas project coding scheme, and for each issue area, the proportions of letters that are noncollaborative, bipartisan, and partisan are identified. Examining why some issues are more collaborative than others reveals that collaboration – particularly bipartisan collaboration – is more common on issues that do not fall neatly onto a liberal–conservative scale, where compromise and common ground are easier to find, and on issues that are on the majority party agenda, where there are more opportunities to create policy by incorporating an idea into a larger, moving bill. The second part of the chapter considers the significance of collaborative policy and establishes that members of Congress routinely coauthor substantive policy proposals, and this is not a phenomenon limited to naming of post offices. These findings support the social exchange theory of collaboration by providing evidence of how expected costs and benefits shape the likelihood of collaboration.

This chapter focuses on the policing of minor offending in China. In contrast with political policing, where law may be present but is not essential, legal regulation has become increasingly important in defining and regulating the policing of minor offending. This chapter examines the significance of this strengthening commitment to legality. Do commitments to legality regularise police power and give institutional form to a people-centred approach to policing? I conclude that rather than constraining police powers, legal reforms have enacted a police-centred model of empowerment. Do differential commitments to legality in policing explain the difference between political and ordinary policing? This chapter concludes that the distinction between political and ordinary policing is not clear, as the concept of legality itself is permeated by and supports (rather than contests) fundamental principles of Party leadership and its core ideological commitments, as well as reflecting the pragmatic objectives of governing social order and maintaining political control.

The ideas and practices of constitutions and constitutionalism were first imported into China in the late 19th century. There were three eras of constitution-making in modern Chinese history: the last decade of Qing imperial rule, the republican era, and the communist era. Dr Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Republic of China (RoC), developed a three-stage theory of China’s political development in which the last stage was to be constitutionalism (xianzheng). Although this was realized in theory when the RoC Constitution of 1946 was enacted, the Constitution became largely suspended as the RoC regime moved to Taiwan and introduced martial law after its defeat by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in the Mainland, which witnessed a new era of constitution-making under the Soviet Union’s influence. However, even today, the discussion of “constitutionalism” (xianzheng) is still discouraged by the PRC regime, although the concepts of the (socialist) Rule of Law and human rights have been affirmed by constitutional amendments. This chapter will review and assess the history of constitution-making in modern China and the discourse of constitutional law scholarship in contemporary China, and it will explore how the case of China both illuminates and challenges conventional understandings of the meaning and significance of constitutions and constitutionalism in the contemporary world.

The chapter explains how the centrist Christian Democratic Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) has responded to the challenges of the silent revolution and counter-revolution by demonstrating a selective willingness to cooperate with the populist radical right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Sufficient electoral distress led to the installation of new leaders who were able to change the strategic status quo. In the first instance, in 1995 Wolfgang Schüssel emphasized policy-seeking and in the second case Sebastian Kurz pursed vote-seeking. Both strategies resulted in a positional alignment and eventually a coalition with the FPÖ, which at the time was pursuing office. Changes in the ÖVP depended on shifts in the balance of power among important intra-party groups, specifically, hardline Conservatives and market Liberals viewing cooperation with the FPÖ as advantageous for their respective interests. Overall, the chapter concludes that while the ÖVP has been affected by massive voter de-alignment since the 1980s, it responded to the counter-revolution and the resulting surge of nativist populism mainly by means of emulation and cooperation.

This chapter examines key assertions about the nature of law and morality under the Xi Jinping administration, identifying that these assertions have been to frame and embed the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s ambitions ‘to lead over everything’ through greater supervision and discipline, including promoting morality-based ‘self-discipline’. In doing so, this chapter firstly looks at the rule of law discourse in the Xi era: how it has come to describe not only state law but also Party rules and modes of governance, including ‘governing the country by moral virtue’. This chapter then identifies how the current discourse has reignited the ideological import of morality from the Mao era and imperial political ideas to affirm the Party’s contemporary moral supremacy to ‘govern the nation according to law’ through socialist core values. Thus in China today, a particular brand of socialist morality is integrated into the overall legal–political mix to shape and justify the ideology of law–morality amalgam being instrumental to the Party’s ambition to bring about a rejuvenated and spiritually civilised well-off society.

In his study of Chinese Communist Party rule-of-law doctrine, Ewan Smith argues that in the Xi Jinping era, Party leadership has shifted the dominant understanding that rule of law functions to rectify institutions to the understanding that it ‘rectifies’ or disciplines individuals as state and non-state actors. The rule of law has been explicitly subordinated to ‘Party Leadership’, and the law has been recast as one form of social control among many. Moreover, the rule of law under Xi is explicitly superstructural. It yields to basic economic changes, including China’s development needs. Moreover, whereas earlier accounts suggest a foreign idea under cautious inspection, Party doctrine under Xi identifies rule of law in China as indigenous and largely unrelated to Western accounts. These shifts in the Party’s frame of reference in relation to rule of law see it now as not merely an ephemeral concept but a ‘superstructural concept’, relativised as ‘Socialist Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics’ in the new era.