Research

Manipulated Date and Motivated Vote: An Experiment on Autocratic Election Schedule and Political Participation in Hong Kong ​ (manuscript)

Abstract: ​Autocratic leaders exploit elections as a tool of authoritarian control, but few have studied their manipulation of the election date; nor do we understand how manipulated schedules influence citizens’ political participation. Conventional wisdom suggests that electoral manipulation demobilizes voters. This paper, however, proposes and shows mobilizing effects of manipulated election schedules on voter turnout and protest participation. Manipulated election schedules send a public signal of regime weakness. Citizens become more likely to turn out and vote and join protests because they anticipate the next electoral contest to be a tight race and the regime less capable of punishing protesters. I draw evidence from an online survey experiment in Hong Kong where the 2020 legislative election was postponed. The experiment demonstrates that the postponement motivates both opposition and government supporters to turn out and vote. A message that frames the postponement with pro-government parties’ electoral weakness increases the turnout of neutral voters. Moreover, various media framings – that associate the postponement with the COVID-19 pandemic, the government’s electoral weakness, or Beijing-orchestrated repression – mobilize opposition supporters to join protests more than the postponement itself does, whereas the framings do not mobilize pro-government rallies. Evidence from the experiment also suggests that the election postponement affects Hong Kongers’ political participation by shifting their perception of whether their peers will vote and protest. These findings support my argument that ordinary citizens under autocracy learn about regime popularity from the rare information revealed by manipulated election schedules, adjust their expectation of peer citizens’ political behavior, and therefore change their own. When the autocratic leader meddles with the election date, the increase in voter turnout does not necessarily improve or hurt the leader’s power; but media framing can backfire on the leader by mobilizing anti-government protests.

Presented at MPSA 2022.