Community-minded communists: A field experiment on party member propensity for community activism in rural Vietnam

In single-party and dominant-party regimes, do party members and non-party members at the grassroots level respond differently to party-linked collective action? This paper examines how different framings of party-linked collective action shape participation among party members and non-party members in Vietnam – one of the world’s most enduring single-party regimes – using a preregistered field experiment involving more than 7000 rural women. Contrary to assumptions that party members engage in party-linked collective action for selective or ideological reasons, we find that party members are also more responsive to collective, community-oriented framings. Using a field experiment and interviews, we show that grassroots party members are more community-minded than their non-party counterparts. These findings suggest that, in addition to careerism or ideological loyalty in authoritarian party membership, altruistic and community-minded engagement is an important additional dimension. The presence of community-oriented grassroots party members has important implications for the legitimacy and durability of dominant-party regimes.