Book Project
Credit for Compliance: How Institutional Proliferation Establishes Control in China
How can autocrats secure compliance, regulate markets, and deter rule-violating behavior? Although all regimes struggle with these fundamental goals of governance, the challenge is particularly pronounced for autocrats, who remain wary of strengthening judicial institutions that are necessary for compliance and order but undermine autocratic power.
I argue that autocrats, in response to this dilemma, embark on a strategy of institutional layering: the creation of new mechanisms to gather and consolidate information and punish violators outside of judicial institutions. This theory and its implications are tested through an empirical examination of the controversial social credit system in China. Contrary to previous descriptions of the social credit system as primarily used for surveillance, my research shows that it addresses the major problems of existing regulatory and legal institutions by consolidating information about rule violators and doling out additional punishments.
The second part of this dissertation examines the effects of institutional proliferation. Taking advantage of the phased-in enactment of the social credit system and new panel data on assessments of rule of law in Chinese cities, I use a difference-in-differences design to show that pilot cities with the social credit system do see an improvement in the enforcement of law relative to comparable cities without it.
This project leverages fieldwork, close readings of government documents, original data on local implementation of the social credit system, modern causal analysis tools, and survey experiments to develop and test a new theory of institutional proliferation.
Publications
Oppose Autocracy without Support for Democracy: A Study of Non-Democratic Critics in China with Tongtong Zhang. Perspectives on Politics. 2025.
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 NDC, 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 visions of what political system should be adopted in its place.
Towards a Unified Approach to Research on Democratic Backsliding with Hans Lueders and Rachel Myrick. Democratization. 2021.
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.
Working Papers
How Competition for Patronage Shapes Government Responsiveness in China with Kaiping Chen Under Review
Patronage is an enduring characteristic of diverse political systems. The actions of patrons have been the primary focus of the last two decades of research on patronage. In this paper, we shift attention to clients. How do clients use communication strategies to gain the favor of patrons? We provide a theoretical framework that describes why and how clients attempt to compete for patron support through information campaigns and test the observable implications by analyzing novel datasets of interactions concerning public grievances between county-level officials (clients) and their city-level superiors (patrons) in China. We find that competition for patronage in China’s non-electoral context harms government responsiveness to the public. Compared to non-client county-level officials, client officials are more likely to engage in information campaigns that play up their diligence in resolving complaints while refuting the veracity of politically damaging public complaints.
Bureaucratic Incentives and Government Responsiveness in China Under Review
Citizen complaints have long been considered an important channel of communication between citizens and officials in authoritarian regimes. Existing explanations for government 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.
European Strategies in the Shadow of Sino-American Competition: A Text-as-Data Approach with Jordan Becker, Seth Benson, Andreea Budeanu, and Maxwell Love
As Sino-American competition becomes a key factor in structuring 21st century international relations, researchers and policymakers are interested in how third states align in relation to China and the US. So far, research on this topic has been qualitative – scholars have speculated as to the alignment of various actors vis-à-vis China and the United States, but no analysis has systematically arranged and compared a group of states or offered a consistent set of measurements for alignment. This limitation impedes the replicability and generalizability of analyses. We introduce a dataset that uses text as data to systematize the discursive alignment of up to 34 European states for as many as 50 years, using two different automated content analysis techniques. We use a specific type of document – national security strategies that may be seen as vessels for national strategic culture. We discuss the main features of this data in the paper, and the replication files will enable other scholars to build on our work in the future. In addition to automating the extraction of quantitative sentiments from key documents, we make our library of documents available for other researchers to analyze along other dimensions of interest to them. We illustrate the utility of the dataset by describing differences across countries and over time. By focusing on European states, we shed light on Europe’s relationship with both China and the United States, as well as the concept of European strategic autonomy.
Anti-China Rhetoric and Asian American Identity: Evidence from a Survey Experiment with Hans Lueders Under Review
In the post-COVID19 pandemic world, Asian Americans have faced two important political trends: the rise of anti-Asian sentiment and heightened US-China tensions. What are the implications of these trends for Asian American identity and political behavior? This project investigates this question using several pre-registered survey experiments among Asian Americans. Our main experiment asks whether and how increasing the salience of recent anti-China policies and rhetoric impacts Asian Americans’ affinity with different aspects of their identity, such as ethnic, pan-ethnic, and American identity. In subsequent experiments, we test whether heightened anti-China rhetoric affects Asian Americans’ support for political candidates and engagement in civic initiatives. We find anti-China rhetoric has a modest effect on Asian Americans’ identity, with non-Chinese Asian Americans identifying more as American and Chinese Americans identifying more with their ethnic group. Anti-China rhetoric does, however, cause Asian Americans to support co-ethnic rather than a pan-ethnic political candidate and to support fundraisers that benefit their co-ethnic group rather than Asian Americans in general. These results, overall, point to a backlash effect of anti-China rhetoric — Asian Americans seek to distance themselves from a pan-ethnic group label when exposed to anti-China rhetoric. This paper establishes a link between hostile foreign policy stances and domestic racial politics. In this way, this paper contributes to scholarship on Asian American identity, immigrant integration, and political cohesion, as well as the burgeoning literature on how race can affect international relations.
Anti-China Rhetoric Reduces Candidate Support among Most Asian American Voters with Hans Lueders Under Review
Politicians routinely engage in anti-China rhetoric, identifying China as an “enemy” and competitor of the United States. How does such rhetoric influence candidate support among Asian American voters? We leverage an original experiment embedded in a survey of 2,200 Asian American voters to examine how support for hypothetical candidates varies with their stance on China. Our findings show that Asian Americans, both those 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 Asian American voters are less likely to support a candidate with an anti-China message because of concerns about discrimination and exclusion, which often 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.
External Threats and Support for International Security Cooperation with Jordan Becker, Matthew DiGiuseppe, and Tongfi Kim
Are voters more willing to accept external security commitments when international threats increase? While much work in international relations treats threats as key drivers of international behavior, we know little about whether bodies politic change attitudes toward important foreign and security policy questions based on changes in threats, threat perceptions, or even information about threats. We address this question about the relationship between threats and attitudes toward security commitments by fielding a pre-registered survey experiment in Japan. 1 Our experiment explores the micro-foundations of international security cooperation by using information about the probability of war between China and Taiwan to increase the perception of threat among our survey respondents. We find that information about the threat of war does, in fact, significantly increase public support for security cooperation in Japan, regardless of whether the posited cooperation is with Australia, India, South Korea, or the United States. Our findings suggest that while the public may oppose security cooperation in peacetime, there is more support for cooperation when threats are made salient.
Works In Progress
Talking Tough, Talking Soft
Authoritarian regimes increasingly leverage public diplomacy to shape international opinion. This paper analyzes how the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) varies rhetoric across audiences using a new corpus of MOFA press conference transcripts from 2002-2024 and covering more than 30,000 question–answer pairs. I develop three complementary measures of rhetorical stance using state-of-the-art machine learning methods to locate each answer on a continuous confrontational -> cooperative scale. I show that responses to questions about Western countries are systematically more confrontational, while responses about non-Western countries are more cooperative, even after conditioning on time and spokespersons. The findings contribute to debates on China’s engagement with other countries and development of soft power through rhetoric.
Haemin Jee 