Writings

How do social relationships among government officials shape information flows within bureaucratic hierarchies? Classic principal–agent theories emphasize information asymmetries as a source of inefficiency, yet we know far less about the actual nature of communication within bureaucracies. We argue that patron–client ties embedded within formal hierarchies play a central role in structuring internal information flows. Lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders have incentives to conduct informal information campaigns that signal diligence and competence as a way to compete for political favors. Using newly assembled data from China—including a rare corpus of internal emails between city-level patrons and county-level clients, as well as original datasets on county governments' public responses to citizen complaints—we find that client counties communicate more frequently with higher-level officials, more often highlight their diligence in addressing complaints, and more actively defend themselves against accusations. However, client and non-client counties perform similarly in how they respond publicly to citizen complaints. These findings reveal how patronage relations can increase upward information flows without impacting public-facing performance. More broadly, these results suggest that communication in non-democratic settings may serve to strengthen informal political ties.

Citizen complaints have long been considered an important channel of communication between citizens and officials in authoritarian regimes. Existing explanations for responsiveness to citizen complaints in China, however, do not adequately consider the role of local bureaucratic incentives as a driver of responsiveness. This paper seeks to explain local government responsiveness to citizen demands through this lens. Original data of citizen complaints and government responses from a Chinese prefecture and its subordinate counties demonstrate that lower level officials are more likely to respond to citizen complaints when monitored by their superiors. On the other hand, they are less responsive on unmonitored forums. Thus, oversight by higher level officials may be important in increasing actual government responsiveness; citizen complaints alone may not be enough to spur government action. While recent studies emphasize authoritarian accountability arising through quasi-democratic institutions, this paper suggests incentives of local political actors may condition the effectiveness of these institutions.

Opponents of authoritarian regimes are often assumed to desire democracy in place of the current regime. In this paper, we show that authoritarian dissidents hold divergent attitudes towards democracy and identify a key bloc within the regime opposition: "non-democratic critics" (NDCs) or those who are dissatisfied with the current regime but resist adopting democracy. We develop the concept of NDCs, theorize why they exist and how they differ from supporters of democracy and the status quo, and test implications of this framework using interviews and an original survey across China. We find that nearly half of respondents who oppose the current Chinese regime are non-democratic critics who also do not support democracy. Compared to democracy and status quo supporters, NDCs have a distinct set of political and socio-economic demands and higher uncertainty about the performance of democracy in meeting these demands. We also find that NDCs are economically better off than democracy supporters, suggesting that unequal access to the benefits of state-led economic development may motivate differing attitudes toward democracy among regime opponents. These findings put forth an important explanation for why the world's largest authoritarian regime endures—those who oppose the regime have divergent and unclear visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.

A growing literature examines democratic backsliding, but there is little consensus on when, where, and why it occurs. Reviewing more than 100 recent articles and working papers, this research note argues that inattention to the measurement of backsliding and the underlying concept of democracy drives this disagreement. We propose three remedies. First, we outline several questions that help researchers navigate common measurement challenges. Second, we argue that conceptual confusion around backsliding is driven in large part by inconsistent definitions of democracy. We show how outlining a comprehensive concept of democracy enables researchers to better account for the diversity of instances of democratic backsliding. Our third contribution is drawing attention to a previously overlooked form of backsliding: when governments lose the effective power to govern or voters and elites increasingly disagree about truths and facts. The research note urges scholars to pay closer attention to the conceptualization and measurement of backsliding prior to empirical analysis.

American politicians of both parties routinely engage in anti-China rhetoric, identifying China as a rival or even an "enemy" of the United States. How does such rhetoric influence candidate support among East and Southeast Asian American voters? We leverage an original experiment embedded in a survey of 2,200 East and Southeast Asian American voters to examine how support for hypothetical candidates varies with their stance on China. Our findings show that these voters, both of Chinese descent and not, are less likely to support candidates who use hostile rhetoric against China. Our data is consistent with the interpretation that this effect is rooted in concerns about belonging and discrimination, which routinely accompany anti-China rhetoric. These findings draw attention to the domestic repercussions of candidates' expressed foreign policy positions and offer new evidence on the political behavior of Asian Americans—the fastest-growing racial group in America today.

What are the implications of US-China competition for Asian American identity and political behavior? Using several pre-registered survey experiments, we explore how increasing the salience of anti-China rhetoric affects East and Southeast Asian Americans' affinity with their ethnic, racial, and American identities as well as how it influences considerations of race and ethnicity in their political engagement. We find that anti-China rhetoric leaves respondents' identities unchanged but has strong and consistent consequences for East and Southeast Asian Americans' political preferences. It causes them to support co-ethnic rather than panethnic political candidates and to support fundraisers that benefit their co-ethnic group rather than Asian Americans more broadly. Overall, these results suggest that East and Southeast Asian Americans seek to distance themselves from the targeted group and are more likely to embrace their ethnic group when exposed to anti-China rhetoric.

Are voters more supportive of external security commitments when international threats increase? While international relations scholarship treats threats as key drivers of state behavior, less is known about threat perception and the micro-foundations of public support for security cooperation. Because international security commitments entail both costs and benefits, threats may not uniformly increase support for cooperation, complicating analysis. We examine this question through pre-registered survey experiments in Japan and South Korea that vary information about external threats by source and intensity. Comparing geographically proximate Japan with more distant South Korea allows us to assess how exposure to regional insecurity shapes public attitudes. We find that information about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan significantly increases support for international security cooperation in both countries. However, this effect depends partly on the proposed partner state, suggesting that threat-induced support for cooperation is conditional rather than uniform.

Strategic alignment is a central concept in international relations, yet it remains difficult to measure independently of the political, economic, and military behaviors it is often used to explain. We introduce the first publicly available dataset of discursive strategic alignment derived from national security strategies and related strategic documents. The dataset draws on a corpus of 736 strategic documents from 100 countries spanning approximately seven decades and provides comparable country-year measures of strategic alignment toward the United States, China, Russia, NATO, and the EU. We generate these measures using transparent and reproducible text-as-data procedures and make both the underlying corpus and replication materials publicly available. We validate this new measure against other indicators of geopolitical alignment, examine whether it reproduces well-known changes in countries' strategic orientations, and illustrate how it can be used to study relationships between strategic discourse and observable political behavior. By measuring alignment through discourse rather than behavior, the dataset enables researchers to investigate the dynamic relationship between strategic preferences and state behavior over time. The resulting corpus, data, and replication materials provide a foundation for future research on strategic alignment, alliance politics, international organizations, strategic culture, and great-power competition.