Browsing by Author "Manion, Melanie Frances"

This study aims to explain the logic behind rumor rebuttal, a form of responsivepropaganda, in authoritarian countries during COVID-19, the story of which initially unfolded as ”rumor”. Taking China at the beginning stage of the outbreak as an example, I generate an original data of unverified and undesirable information on social media set, by combining both refuted and censored posts through keyword matching. I find that when faced with a dilemma between being responsive to the social need of accurate information to control the pandemic and securing authoritarian rule by not repeating rumor so as to increase its spreading power, the Chinese government chooses to refute rumors that have no political implications. When refuting rumors with political implications, censorship is also adopted. This study contributes to an understudying of information politics in authoritarian regimes. I analyze how an authoritarian government carries out a campaign against undesirable information using multiple techniques simultaneously, and I make a clear distinction between rumor content and political implications, which is noted in the literature but has not been used to understand authoritarian government communication behavior so far.

Subnational officials in strong authoritarian states are often depicted as passive agents under central command or opportunists resisting central control. This dissertation rejects the former characterization by recognizing the substantial autonomy of subnational officials and challenges the latter characterization by spotlighting the central-local alignment of interests as a common situation. The more the interests of the central government and the local level coincide, the more autonomy is granted. In particular, how subnational officials exercise their autonomy depends on whether the center supervises policy outcomes. Using rigorous quantitative methods, this dissertation examines how subnational officials exercise autonomy in unsupervised and supervised policy areas, respectively, using China’s social security system and the COVID-19 lockdown. Without top-down supervision, China’s subnational officials delivered different redistributive outcomes that reflected their perceived threat of local collective action. With top-down supervision, I show that China’s subnational officials delivered similar pandemic control outcomes but chose different lockdown measures that reflected their perceived top-down political priority. In sum, subnational officials in authoritarian states are actors with strong agency whose preferences have important implications for policy decisions. The lack of variation in policy outcomes does not necessarily mean a lack of autonomy.

Scholars contend that in weak institutional contexts, political leaders rely on informal networks or ad hoc campaigns to push through policies that challenge powerful local interests. My dissertation challenges this conventional view by arguing that top leaders in authoritarian regimes can effectively enhance local policy compliance by improving and adapting formal institutions to different local conditions, with the support of advanced technology and strong political commitment at the top. With a special focus on the central directives of differentiated work priorities and performance evaluation standards in the context of air pollution control in China, I find that a place-based performance evaluation system enables the central government to exert flexible political control over different regions by assigning them varying work priorities that cater to their specific local conditions and changing environment. In addition to the high-powered promotion incentive, I show that disclosing performance rankings creates an additional incentive for local officials to exert effort on future performance improvement, particularly those who appear at the bottom of the rankings. Finally, I argue that aligning local officials’ interests through formal institutions does not always yield desired outcomes, especially during times of political uncertainty. Informal institutions are, however, more effective in motivating local officials to carry out policy tasks because they can provide protection and assurance to officials. I substantiate this claim by examining how patronage networks shape China's local COVID-19 responses. In sum, a combination of formal and informal institutions remains at work in ensuring policy implementation and bureaucratic compliance in authoritarian countries.

Scholars contend that in a weak institutional context, firms enter the political marketplace primarily through bribery or entrepreneurs running for public office. My dissertation challenges this conventional understanding by arguing that revolving-door channels have become a prevalent means of rent-seeking when within-government career opportunities are rare for public officials and the private sector is profitable. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of revolving-door officials in authoritarian regimes and tests this framework through a rigorous inquiry of firms in China. The three papers that constitute this work analyze the pattern, formation, and economic outcome of hiring revolving-door officials. I show the distortionary impact of post-government career concerns on public resource allocation, a mixed revolving-door recruitment strategy adopted by firms seeking both political power and regulatory expertise, and the salient signaling effect of revolving-door connections on financial investors.

Anti-corruption efforts in authoritarian regimes are often seen as insincere charades or tools used for intra-elite struggles and factional purges. This paper advances an alternative view that considers their substantial effects. I argue that authoritarian anti-corruption efforts can have positive effects on foreign direct investment (FDI) by disciplining officials and improving the environment for foreign investors. I substantiate this claim by examining how China's anti-corruption efforts and in particular, the ongoing large-scale anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping influence FDI inflow to China. Theoretically building a formal model and empirically using an original province-origin-level panel dataset for the period from 2008 through 2019, two-way fixed effects models, and a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that anti-corruption efforts are conducive to FDI inflow to China and such positive effects are more significant when the effort is in large-scale. Yet Xi's campaign has a non-differential effect on foreign investors from different origins. I propose three explanations for this non-differential effect: the effectiveness of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the sincerity of Xi's campaign, and pre-campaign perfect price discrimination. These findings highlight the substantial effect and limitations of authoritarian anti-corruption efforts.

This paper studies how elite purges affect local officials’ repression of mass protests in authoritarian regimes. I propose a selective repression mechanism: local officials, fearing purge, strengthen repression of more threatening protests while tolerating less threatening ones so as to comply with the autocrat’s preference. The perception of purge threat affects this choice. Using data on Chinese labor protests and two-way fixed effect models that exploit temporal variation in purges across 327 Chinese cities, from 2011 to 2018, I find purges increase the likelihood of local officials’ repression of labor protests with more participants and those demanding social rights. Patron-connected officials exercise intensified selective repression due to a stronger perception of purge threat.

Scholars of comparative politics have long recognized that coercive capacity is critical to the resilience and survival of authoritarian regimes. What explains the subnational variation in coercive capacity and repression intensity in authoritarian regimes? This paper traces the origin of state coercive capacity by linking land reform with state violence. I argue that the radicalism of land reforms is reflected in the elite configuration of coercive institutions, which subsequently shape repression outcomes. Using a novel dataset on land reform (1950-1955) and state violence in seven provinces of Southern China, I find that, counties that expropriated more land during the land reform recruited more poor and uneducated peasants into the local Party branches as well as more peasants into the Peasant Associations. Moreover, Peasant Associations that recruited more members would generate more ”fourtypes” by 1957. The findings contribute to the understanding of state violence in authoritarian regimes by probing the formation of its institutional foundation.

Bureaucracy is a pillar of state building. I examine how new states achieve the transition from tenuous rule to consolidated rule. Rulers can diversify the selection system to recruit agents who have different skill sets to solve the dual challenges of territorial pacification and routine administration in pursuit of state-building. While rulers appoint officials who have cultural training resources to maintain routine governance, they turn to officials with practical skills to pacify contentious areas.

This dissertation brings bureaucracy to the debate on state-building and contributes to the literature about meritocracy and bureaucratic politics. I draw on archives to build an original dataset on the prefects of Qing Dynasty of Imperial China prefectural and conflict incidents to test this theory. First, I explain the temporal variation in recruitment channels by describing how appointment strategies responded to perceived regime threats, conditioned by the supply side constraint. Second, I find that during peaceful times the Qing imperial court was more likely to appoint officials who passed entered the Imperial Civil Service Exams during peaceful times, but they the court turned to Manchu officials and office purchasers after conflicts broke out. Third, I examine the impact of bureaucratic structure on state performance. I test whether or not the exam officials performed better in terms of delivering famine relief and establishing charities. I find the Qing imperial court shifted to appointing officials with military skills and fiscal resources after conflicts broke out from appointing officials who entered the administration via the exam route. I also find that the exam officials did not perform better than non-exam officials in governance, measured by famine relief measures and charitable activities. I conclude the dissertation by summarizing the theoretical framework and empirical findings, discussing limitations, and reviewing the research agenda.

Voter turnout reflects political participation in both democracies and autocracies, and corruption's impact on turnout is a matter of long-term debate. Previous literature has addressed three major theories: the distrust theory, trade theory, and the removal theory. However, the empirical analysis of corruption's impact on turnout is limited, especially for authoritarian regimes. Though several researchers discuss the cross-national impact of corruption perception on turnout, they do not evaluate the effect of actual corrupt activities. Based on village-level elections in China, this research responds to the gaps in the literature by analyzing how corruption perception, experienced corruption, and electoral corruption impact turnout in contested elections in autocracies. This paper estimates hierarchical generalized linear models and uses mediation analysis to analyze data from the China Survey 2008. It finds: (1) citizen perceptions of corruption depress turnout by lowering interest in elections, which is inconsistent with the removal theory; (2) both corruption perceptions and experienced corruption can raise people's concern about Chinese democracy and consequently depress turnout; this mediation analysis reveals that corruption influences turnout through dwindling trust in the regime; (3) electoral corruption increases turnout directly, which supports the trade theory. Overall, although corruption can directly “buy” votes, it may undermine voting by decreasing political trust in both elections and the regime.

Recent literature on comparative authoritarianism emphasizes the evolution from fear-based rule rooted in violence and indoctrination to a softer, savvier brand of dictatorship that trades on democratic-looking institutions and manipulation of the information environment. The case of contemporary China---where leaders have incorporated a range of old and new repressive tactics to exert control over society---complicates this trajectory. Leveraging novel data sources and a variety of empirical methods, this dissertation assesses the everyday mechanics of repression in China. In three papers that each examine a distinct coercive institution---the communal canteens of the Great Famine era (1958-1961), and neighborhood policing and digital surveillance in contemporary China---this project returns our focus to repression, and provides new insights into how a strong, authoritarian state has synthesized a range of repressive strategies to maintain order and power in the world’s most populous autocracy.

Which demands are more likely to elicit substantive responses from governments that are not electorally accountable? This study analyzes factors affecting the degree of government responsiveness to citizen demands in China. Based upon information-gathering theory and features of the hierarchical bureaucratic system, I build a three-actor (government leaders, government functionaries, and ordinary citizens) framework to disaggregate local government in China and consider the difference in the degree of responsiveness from the perspective of government functionaries actually responding (or not responding) to citizen demands. I argue that the degree of attentiveness from functionaries (the clarity of the demand), the incentives for functionaries to respond (upward accountability and the principal-agent problem), and the difficulty of responsiveness for functionaries (the difficulty of the demand) are three dimensions that can explain the differential responsiveness to citizen demands. Empirically, I establish a new measure of government responsiveness in China distinguishing substantive responses from negative and perfunctory replies. I exploit a random sample of an original dataset containing over 130,000 online demands and government replies in an online petition institution in a Chinese city to test hypotheses implied by my theory. Regression results show that (1) explicit demands are more likely to elicit substantive responses than vague demands; (2) demands that align with the agendas of government leaders are more likely to elicit substantive responses than other demands; and (3) demands that require more effort to satisfy are less likely to elicit substantive responses than other demands. This study enriches our understanding of government responsiveness by usefully complicating the conventional analytical view of authoritarian responsiveness in the existing literature. This study also provides insights into interactions between ordinary citizens and officials under quasi-democratic authoritarian institutions in the real world.

States play an important role in structuring the production process. I examine three different types of state interventions and their subsequent effects on how firms, as the organizers of production, operate. I argue that existing theories of state intervention abstract away from important facets of how production is organized in modern industrial societies. By explicitly defining the firm as the unit of production, I outline several different avenues for state power to meaningfully shift how production inputs and outputs are allocated, showcasing three in particular with a focus on contemporary China.

First, I find that states can utilize their ownership stake in industrial firms to better assess and collect taxes from industrial firms. This ownership stake can substitute for other more traditional tax bureaucracies, and also gives states the power to achieve political goals via the production process rather than tax-and-spend policies. Second, I show that political purges in authoritarian countries can reduce theft by private firm controllers by reducing the flow of government subsidies to private firms and thereby imposing fiscal discipline on firm controllers. Finally, I highlight the limits of state intervention, showing that even massive political shocks can have little effect on long-run distributions of human capital and productive labor.

Scholarship on protests in China, though prolific in recent years, faces serious data issues. Since there is no comprehensive dataset for a systematic analysis of protests in China, previous scholars can only quantitatively study the pattern of repression of protests. Most studies related to the protest outcomes or government responses in China can only use qualitative methods. Drawing on an original dataset of 508 protests I collected from the Wickdonna website, this article first offers a systematic analysis of the response pattern to protests in China. My paper shows that domestic media coverage and the government's perception of political threats and economic costs are the most significant determinants of the government's response to a protest. While the size of the protest, the disruptiveness of the protest, and the geographical location of the protest have no direct impact on the government's results, they significantly increase the odds of media coverage of a protest. Overall, my paper contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of daily contentions in authoritarian China.

How do citizens in authoritarian China talk about politics with one another in the social media era? Political talk is a social activity in authoritarian regimes as much as it is in democracies. However, the scholarship has so far dominantly focused on state-citizen interactions in political communication in authoritarian regimes, overlooking the dynamics of citizen-citizen interaction. In this dissertation, I present a new theory, original data, and two novel methods to understand social media political talk in authoritarian China. I argue that citizens in the social media era are engaged in a new form of preference falsification: expressing truthful political opinions to strangers outside their network while lying to “friends” in their network. I theorize that the behavior is attributable to a combination of psychological rewards for being truthful and social punishment for being a dissident. A consequence of the behavior, I posit, is discouragement of collective action, which stabilizes authoritarian rules. I test the theory with an original dataset I collected from Chinese social media. In addition, I develop two novel methods to analyze big social media data of political communication in authoritarian China and beyond. I develop ATIOS, a system based on distributed semantics that generates valid and replicable text-as-data measurement. I introduce Bayesian Dynamic Network Modeling, a method that efficiently models time series of social media networks. With this dissertation, I contribute new theories and methods for the study of contemporary Chinese politics and comparative political behavior.

This paper seeks to explain the phenomena of popular foreign vloggers in domestic Chinese media by using existing theories in propaganda, nationalism, and social identity theory. Selecting six videos from domestic Chinese social media Bilibili, I generate original data of 1,125 comments from these six videos. I find that holding everything else equal, videos with foreign vloggers who speak fluent Chinese will elicit more positive comments from the audience than foreign vloggers who do not. Moreover, the word “China”, “U.S.” and “foreign” appeared more frequently in videos by Chinese-speaking vloggers, and comments praising foreign vloggers’ Chinese skills constitute half of all the positive comments in one video. This study contributes to people’s understanding of nationalism and propaganda. It is also the first time, to the author’s knowledge, that social identity theory has been applied to the Chinese context in the discipline of political science. This study has implications for future studies and studies outside of China as well.

Nearly three years after the first pandemic outbreak, China relaxed its Zero-Covid policy. During the period of strict control, some local officials flexibly achieved both pandemic control and economic recovery with targeted measures, while others insisted on stringent policies with large-scale lockdowns even when the number of infected cases was low. Under the uniform Zero-Covid policy, why did subnational governments facing a similar level of infection adopt different lockdown decisions? This paper argues that state capacity is key to understanding heterogeneity in policy implementation. Specifically, using a two-way fixed effects model, this paper provides robust evidence that, first, fiscal capacity, the conventional dimension of state capacity, does not significantly influence lockdown decisions. Second, medical capacity, the capacity closely related to the policy goal, explains the variation: cities with weaker medical capacity, i.e., fewer medical workers for achieving pandemic control, are more likely to prefer strict measures with large-scale lockdowns, while high-capacity cities prefer targeted measures with small-scale lockdowns. Third, different dimensions of capacity are not necessarily correlated: cities with strong fiscal capacity do not necessarily have strong medical capacity. In sum, state capacity is multidimensional and varies across localities, and heterogeneity in policy implementation is shaped by capacity contingent on the policy goal, especially in times of crisis.