Explaining asymmetric political participation in the reform era of Vietnam

In democracies, political participation refers to citizens' routinized activities to peacefully influence the government. In non-democracies, the only, yet high-cost and essentially risky means of participation, to "influence" the government to make it change the course of action is by resistance .;What is surprised in the reform era of Vietnam is that: In places where people distrust and challenge the local authorities, they appear to obey the central-national government.;The established institutional theories explain that: (i) Restrictive institutions that produce bad policy outputs at the local level make people distrust and challenge the local authorities, and freer institutions that are responsive and responsible at the central-national level make people trust and obey the central government; or (ii) Freer institutions at the grassroots levels allow people who are negatively affected by the policy outputs to challenge the local authorities, and restrictive institutions that create the threat of suppression at the central-national level compel people to obey the central government.;From the cultural perspective, the research provides a complementary, in many cases, alternative explanation that: natural socialization and low Confucian ethics make people distrust and challenge the local authorities, but planned socialization and Socialist ethics make people obey the central-national government.;Looking at the case study of participation by members of a community located in the capital city of Hanoi, the research finds that: from the institutional analysis, there are "areas of restraint" for both local and central governments' suppressive policy and a "zone of indifference" for citizens' protests--this demonstrates the presence of culture in the use of power to manage state-society relations in the reform period; from cultural analysis, there is evidence of nascent civic norms and civic culture in between the low Confucian and Socialist values; and between institutional and cultural layers, there is a layer of an emerging civil society.