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Working Papers

Manipulated Date and Motivated Vote: How Changing Election Dates Shapes Turnout (R&R at Political Behavior)

Abstract: Autocracies exploit election schedules for political control, but we lack theory and evidence for understanding how voters respond to manipulated schedules. While conventional wisdom suggests that electoral manipulation demobilizes voters, this paper argues that manipulated election dates can motivate voter turnout because citizens, especially opposition supporters, may anticipate that their camp will be more competitive in the rescheduled election, thus increasing their likelihood of turnout. Evidence from a survey experiment in Hong Kong demonstrates that election postponement motivates both government and opposition supporters to vote. However, framing election postponement as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic or a regime strategy to deter opposition increases the turnout of government supporters, while framing postponement as a signal of the government’s weakness increases opposition turnout. Government supporters are motivated by a perceived decrease in the cost of voting, whereas opposition supporters mobilize as they believe more of their fellow citizens will vote for the opposition. Results are robust to potential falsification. These findings suggest that manipulated election schedules are consequential in shaping citizens’ political behavior, with crucial implications for election turnout and authoritarian stability.

Turnout Intention by Group

Mark Dictators’ Calendars: The Manipulation of Election Schedules in Autocracies (under review)

Abstract: Autocratic elections are at the mercy of the dictator. While scholars have long debated the political consequences of autocratic elections, we lack a clear understanding of the timing of autocratic elections. Some dictators hold elections as scheduled, while others manipulate the election date or cancel scheduled elections altogether. This paper argues that the dictator's scheduling decisions hinge on the leader's expected strength. Building on game-theoretic logic, I demonstrate that weak dictators–those that lack either a strong party to mobilize electoral support or a strong military to repress opposition mobilization–are more likely than strong ones to manipulate election schedules, in the hope of avoiding the exposure of their weakness. This paper tests these expectations with over six decades of original data on autocratic election schedules–election announcements, postponements, cancellations, and occurrences. I find that weak dictators are the most likely to manipulate election schedules. The findings imply that dictators interrupt elections when they have little confidence to defeat electoral or armed challenges.

Marginal Effects on Schedule Interruption

Marginal Effects on Schedule Interruption: Nominal Strength Indices

I Leave in Peace: Autocratic Elections and Negotiated Regime Transitions

Abstract: Do elections conduce to or prevent autocratic regime breakdown? This paper distinguishes between negotiated and forced transitions, and it posits that elections facilitate negotiated regime transitions. Elections reveal information about regime strength, which aligns power contenders’ expectations about the outcome of a potential armed conflict. Therefore, elections in the recent past make power contenders more likely to negotiate a peaceful regime transition. Using two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable models, this paper examines regime transitions in 261 autocracies from 1955 to 2010 with long regime-month panel data. It introduces a new global dataset of autocratic election schedules and a novel measure of autocratic party strength. Findings suggest that negotiated transitions are more likely to occur in autocracies with recent national elections than in those without; but this negotiation effect only holds for regimes with either no support party or a weak one, because strong ruling parties shape power contenders’ expectations about regime strength, leaving less room for elections to yield information. This paper demonstrates the distinct logics of negotiated and forced transitions with implications for understanding how and when elections can produce peaceful regime change.

Marginal Effects of Elections on Negotiated Transitions

International Mudslinging in Vain: An Experiment on COVID-Related Propaganda and Overseas Nationals’ Support for Autocratic Government (with Rosemary Pang) (under review)

Abstract: Overseas nationals—especially highly educated and internationally mobile citizens—are important targets for autocratic governments seeking to retain political loyalty, attract talent return, and bolster regime legitimacy abroad. Thus, authoritarian countries such as China use state-run propaganda beyond national borders to shape the attitudes of these populations. Alongside positive propaganda that highlights governmental achievements, negative propaganda that emphasizes the incompetence or malice of foreign governments is also widely used. But how effective is this strategy in promoting overseas nationals’ support for their government? This paper argues that international negative propaganda is less effective than positive propaganda because of the “backlash” against propaganda senders: receivers may suspect the sender’s motive because of their incongruent ideology or inconsistent information with the propaganda message. We implement two waves of a survey experiment on Chinese students in American universities using real COVID-19 propaganda messages from China’s official media. We find that while positive propaganda weakly promotes subjects’ support for their government, negative propaganda is not as effective, particularly on subjects who are ideologically liberal, do not see COVID-19 as very severe in America, or have received health kits from Chinese consulates. Our findings suggest that international negative propaganda is not an effective strategy to shift overseas nationals’ opinions in their government’s favor. More broadly, negative messaging against foreign governments may not help autocratic governments win the hearts and minds of overseas audiences.

Average Treatment Effects: Positive Propaganda as Baseline

Publish More as Corruption Perishes: Scientific Research and Anticorruption Campaigns (with Zhongyang He) (under review)

Abstract: Academic corruption is a challenge to the global scientific community, but little do we understand how anticorruption campaigns impact research activities. This paper argues that anticorruption campaigns can boost research output of universities that are not direct targets of the campaign. We draw evidence from more than one hundred top Chinese universities some of which were Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign targets between 2012 and 2017. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show a more than 10% increase in a university’s paper publication after its neighbor universities in the same province are inspected, while no significant change is observed in universities under inspection. We attribute these findings to the redistribution of research resources—resulting from the anticorruption campaign--from universities directly hit by the campaign to those that are not, increasing research output of the latter. In the directly targeted universities, however, the impact of the campaign is twofold: it creates a chilling effect that increases scientists’ perceived compliance risk of research activities, and it also redistributes research resources in favor of underfunded, marginally more efficient researchers. Together, these two effects cancel each other out. Our findings imply that the advancement of science benefits from a high standard of research integrity and government campaigns to cleanse corruption on campus.

University Inspection Progress: 2013-2018

Lying Low in Line: Cascade of Falsification about Political Participation Amid Autocratization

Abstract: Despite the conventional wisdom that citizens under autocratic rule often falsify political preferences, we lack the understanding of how falsification emerges during the process of autocratization. For citizens accustomed to the freedom of speech, the shift should be a process: opposition supporters do not immediately switch to concealing their true preference; only explicit signals of autocratization trigger falsification; and government supporters can also show the tendency to falsify due to social desirability bias. This paper presents a 2021 survey in Hong Kong, a polity undergoing a major institutional overhaul and political realignment toward autocracy. I compare respondents’ reported turnout intention and the item-count estimates from a list experiment to probe whether respondents—and which ones—conceal their true intention to vote in the city’s postponed 2021 legislative elections. I do not find evidence that shows opposition supporters in Hong Kong concealing their intention to turn out. Rather, government supporters over-reported their intention to vote. Results from the survey experiment suggest that only explicit information about repression induces under-reporting of turnout intention, whereas information about election postponement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and electioneering of the government does not have the effect. These findings stress that citizens’ shift toward falsification does not happen overnight.

List Experiment of Turnout Intention

Turnout Intention: Direct Answers and Item Counts

When They Flex Muscles: Military Parade and Citizens’ Falsification in Political Expression (under review)

Abstract: Military parades can inspire public support for the government, whereas they also signal the government’s repressive force and thus deter defiance, especially in autocracies. How do military parades affect citizens’ political expression? This paper proposes a strategy to examine falsification in closed autocracies by examining how citizens report factual political information. A quasi-experimental study using the Chinese General Social Survey shows that China’s 2015 Victory Day Parade significantly shifted respondents’ political expression, in terms of reporting more truthfully about their ties with the regime. The finding suggests that military parades signal the regime’s repressive force and remind citizens of the risk of falsifying regime ties. Moving beyond previous studies about how hard propaganda induces citizens’ preference falsification to feign political loyalty, this paper stresses that hard propaganda can also make people more truthful when they report factual political information.

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