Browsing by Subject "Political science"

This paper contributes to the literature in nancial aid and authoritarian institutions.

For a long time, scholars are debating whether nancial aid is able to facilitate

development and governance. Though abundant evidence is provided, the answer is

still inconclusive. On the other hand, scholars investigating China argue that the

leadership uses various institutions to ensure local ocials' compliance. In this paper,

we nd that the nancial aid does not bring a positive impact and the central

government in China does not have enough monitoring capacity to force local o-

cials to comply. We study a redevelopment program established by Chinese central

government after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. By adopting a geographic regression

discontinuity combining with a dierence-in-dierences design, we show that

the redevelopment program does not signicantly develop the disaster area. On the

contrary, the evidence implies that the economy in the disaster area is worse after

receiving the aid. The results imply that local ocials do not follow the central government's

regulations and misuse the aid money for other purposes. In the future, we

expect to further investigate through which mechanism do local ocials undermine

the existing institutions.

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Examining the full set of leaders and their spouses in both China and the U.S. during the last quarter century, this paper explores how the first lady of China has become a more important position, why she has become a more public figure, how this compares with the American first lady, and why her position in China is similar to, but different from that in the U.S., in determining whether the recent change in Chinese First Ladyship is due to systematic development or just the relationship between Mrs. Xi and her husband. After investigating the current relationship in China, furthermore, this paper also intends to discuss what we can expect with the new First Ladyship in the future.

Does Chinese aid cause more civil conflicts in Africa? Doubts have been cast about Chinese development assistance finance. In this article, I argue that Chinese aid is likely to arouse more civil conflicts in Africa because Chinese aid’s non-conditionality on the recipient country tends to cause the moral hazard problem—— the recipient country may use the aid to strengthen its capacity to repress the dissents and rebels, while the unfair aid allocation could intensify the grievances in that country. Focusing on Chinese aid and African conflicts nexus from 2004 to 2013, I collect data from multiple databases and websites, and conduct a series of negative binomial regression analyses. In order to evade aid’s endogeneity problem, I employ Confucius Institutes’ development level as my instrumental variable to predict Chinese aid. I find that Chinese official aid money and Chinese official aid projects have explanatory powers for a recipient country’s civil conflicts. This study attempts to contribute to the scholarship by clarifying Chinese aid’s effects on African conflicts through an instrumental variable approach and by extending the time range for research from 2004 to 2013.

In this dissertation, I seek to understand the power of legal actors in determining punitiveness in plea bargaining in criminal courts. Using a unique combination of administrative court data and qualitative interviews, I evaluate the influence of the chief elected prosecutor, line prosecutors, and defense attorneys on plea bargaining practices and punitiveness in case outcomes across multiple local court systems. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of the association between the elected chief prosecutor and prosecution and active sentence rates in four types of criminal cases in nine districts in North Carolina. The study finds that chief prosecutors influenced punitiveness, but their influence was not aligned with their political party. Although Democratic and Republican chief prosecutors did not differ in levels of punitiveness, the one progressive prosecutor in the sample reduced punitiveness across most crime types to the lowest levels out of all nine study districts. Chapter 3 examines how line prosecutors working in one progressive prosecutor’s office reduced punitiveness in case outcomes, mainly by dismissing weak and low-priority cases even before they reached the plea bargaining stage. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the power of the defense attorney in plea bargaining, and shows how the legal actors and context of the plea bargaining interaction impacted defense attorneys’ leverage and negotiation strategies. These chapters provide insights into current movements to reform prosecution and reduce mass incarceration in the United States, and shed light on how punitiveness may be impacted through the complex process of plea bargaining.

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.

How would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.

How do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.

In this dissertation I analyze aspects of American civil-military relations and the political economy of national security policymaking. Specifically, I examine efforts to balance the military power necessary to secure American interests while considering the economic implications towards the national debt, veteran behavior in congressional resource allocation, and how civil-military relations relate to military effectiveness. I employ qualitative, quantitative, as well as mixed-methods research in examining policymaker rhetoric, voting records and bill sponsorship data, as well as a list of military use-of-force decisions. I find that policymakers deliberately consider the tradeoffs between debt and defense spending, that veterans demonstrate a small yet distinct behavior on military issues considered by Congress, and that operational outcomes were not more likely to be better when military authorities applied their preferences than when civilians asserted theirs. This dissertation helps fill important underexplored gaps in American civil-military relations and political economy of security studies.

In this dissertation, I challenge the unitary-actor assumption of contemporary theoretical models of American politics and re-conceptualize party competition as an evolutionary process. I begin by discussing the assumptions of Darwin's theory and their applicability to American party competition. Building on these assumptions, I then develop a formal evolutionary model of party competition that I test against empirical data regarding the two parties' shifting stances on abortion policy from 1972-2010.

Chapter 2 presents several single-party models that focus on explaining the conditions that must hold for parties to emerge as populations in an evolutionary sense. I show that only when candidates experience common selection pressures will population dynamics arise.

Chapter 3 extends this model to two-party competition wherein population dynamics are sustained by inter-party competition for votes and intra-party competition for activist resources. Two-party competition provides the necessary selection pressures needed to foster the emergence of coherent and distinct party populations. However, this will only be the case when: (1) party resources are valuable for winning elections, (2) the distribution of party resources are biased towards ideologically extreme candidates, and (3) parties have sufficient resources.

In Chapter 4, I extend the model to a multi-dimensional setting. Previous theoretical work on multi-dimensional party dynamics has been divided between (1) analytical models that provide stable equilibria results and (2) qualitative theories that seek to explain the dynamic process of party change. In this chapter, I present a formalized model that makes precise predictions regarding both the environmental conditions that lead to locally stable policy positions and the dynamic process that occurs as the parties drift from one stable configuration to another in response to changing environmental conditions.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply my model to the case of abortion policy in the United States from 1972-2010. Using data from public opinion surveys and Congressional roll-call votes, I show that party polarization on abortion was driven by changing activist preferences and that this shift occurred almost entirely as the result of incumbent replacement. These results support my ecological party model and demonstrate its ability to account for the kinds of gradual party movements -- driven by incumbent replacement -- that characterize many important historical shifts in party platforms.

In this paper I revisit a perplexing question about Arendt’s theory of judgment: what is the relationship between the normative function of judgment and the perspective of the vita contemplativa in her Kant Lectures. Pace the scholars who conceive the perspective of the vita contemplativa as a perspective irrelevant to guiding our activities and appraisal, I suppose that the perspective of the vita contemplativa is intrinsic to Arendt’s project to study the normative function of judgment. I will argue that Arendt’s quest for intersubjectivity is not adequate if it is not completed by a robust criterion to tell the justified right to demand universal assent from the spurious ones. Therefore, she has to find a perspective with reference to which this condition could be specified. Now the perspective of the vita contemplativa plays this role.

Asian-black political relations in the United States have been most frequently examined in the arena of urban/local politics and especially in terms of the degree of conflict and competition. No previous study on Asian-black relations outside of the local realm has been pursued. Given the small but growing numbers of Asian American elected officials, Asian Americans' political and social relations with other minority political elites are becoming an especially salient and relevant concern, and will likely become even more significant over time. By moving beyond the urban arena, this study attempts to systemically assess Asian-black relations in the state level politics with the central aim of analyzing their nature whether those relations take the forms of conflict or cooperation. Analyzing state legislative roll call votes from California and Maryland on selected issues from 1999 to 2014, I show that black representatives have very supportive/cohesive voting records on the most salient concerns of Asians and that Asian representatives also have supportive voting records on the most salient concerns of blacks but slightly less than the blacks'. The findings indicate that Asian and black state legislators support each to a higher degree than party affiliation might alone suggest, and also suggest the absence of conflict that is often found in urban-level politics.

How effectively has China utilized its economic power to gain political support worldwide? This paper aims to answer this question, which is vital to understanding the new dynamics of the international order, through a more appropriate quantitative analysis. To this end, it first discusses why the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Voting Data, which is commonly used to measure a country's foreign policy alignment, is a relatively ineffective method. Thereafter, it proposes a new set of measurements that better represent China's core political intentions under its overseas economic efforts: other countries' support for China's sovereign standing and China-built new international institutions. I also argue that different types of economic interactions may influence other countries' political support for China in varying patterns. By creating novel datasets to measure other countries' alignment with China on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), I find that China has partly translated its economic power into its global political influence with different mechanisms. First, countries that receive more aid from China are more inclined to align with China's sovereign standings. Second, countries that trade more with China are more likely to show explicit political support for China-built new institutions. These findings advance our understanding of China's economic power and the complex interaction between global politics and economy.

Credibility has long been a subject of interest in international relations. However, recent works minimize some of the earliest and most intriguing credibility questions. To what degree is accuracy related to credibility, do private signals exist solely in the shadow of their public counterparts or do they have credibility of their own? Moreover, how do leaders weigh concurrent public and private signals during a crisis? In this thesis, I examine the nature of public and private signals in the Cuban Missile Crisis in an inductive, qualitative manner. I find that in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite some rationalist assertions, private signals are at times meaningful. Moreover, the divergences between public and private signals are limited. As such, the two exist in an interactional, almost double-helical state. This finding has distinct importance for the future of credibility scholarship.

The persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.

I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders.

Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.

Studies on the effect of regime type on public goods provision have tended to take a quantitative, cross-national approach to examining the relationship between regime type and access to public goods, and have demonstrated that democracies produce better public goods outcomes than non-democracies for a variety of theoretical reasons, including politics being more competitive in democracies, democracies needing to appease a greater proportion of their population, and re-election incentives. Such studies, however, have not aimed to understand which segments of the population receive access to benefits and the literature examining this question has tended to focus on the distribution of benefits in democracies. As such, little is known about how authoritarianism itself affects the distribution of public services.

This dissertation examines how inequalities in access to drinking water and wastewater services arise in authoritarian regimes. In examining Egypt during the period of 1882 to 2015, and using archival documents, census data, electoral returns, and interviews, I find that the groups that are prioritized for receiving access to drinking water and wastewater services differ across the different regimes within this time period, as they are a product of the goals that leaders are seeking to achieve and the structure of the authoritarian political system that is implemented, which affects elite composition, the degree of influence that leaders have over policymaking, and the regime’s relationship with the mass public.

I also find that in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, self-undermining policy feedbacks, which occur when those who are not benefitting from government policy that is currently in place push for significant changes in policy, can affect the state’s response to expressed discontent regarding the state of public services, but that democratization is not necessarily correlated with greater investment in public services.

Overall, the findings emphasize that political will plays an important role in affecting the distribution of public services in an authoritarian setting.

Event data provide high-resolution and high-volume information about political events. From COPDAB to KEDS, GDELT, ICEWS, and PHOENIX, event datasets and the frameworks that produce them have supported a variety of research efforts across fields and including political science. While these datasets are machine-coded from vast amounts of raw text input, they nonetheless require substantial human effort to produce and update sets of required dictionaries. I introduce a novel method for generating large dictionaries appropriate for event-coding given only a small sample dictionary. This technique leverages recent advances in natural language processing and deep learning to greatly reduce the researcher-hours required to go from defining a new domain-of-interest to producing structured event data that describes that domain. An application to cybersecurity is described and both the generated dictionaries and resultant event data are examined. The cybersecurity event data are also examined in relation to existing datasets in related domains.

This dissertation investigates the role of behavioral factors in the personnel selection in authoritarian ruling parties. First, I argue that authoritarian ruling parties increase the weight of dispositional and behavioral criteria in personnel selection as a response to structural changes. Namely, the reasons behind this shift are that an authoritarian ruling party faces similar problems in personnel selection (such as heterogeneities in agents’ tasks and the multitask problem) and the party can no longer observe members’ and cadres’ loyalty based on a single indicator. Subsequently, I argue that risk attitudes, a key dispositional concept in applied psychology and behavioral politics, explain cadres’ propensities to engage in policy innovation and their obedience to the party leadership's authority and orders. I further examine two mechanisms that might explain the relationship between risk attitudes and obedience, namely sensation-seeking and loss aversion. Finally, I contend that authoritarian ruling parties employ a diversified strategy of personnel selection when they assign cadres to different offices. To test the arguments, the author employs a mixed-method approach and utilizes archival evidence, original cadre survey experiments, original survey data, and interviews in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the largest authoritarian ruling party in the world.

People tend to hold more positive attitude to central government relative to local governments in east Asian single-party regimes. Drawing from political psychology literature, I argue the information environment biased against local governments shaped people’s political attitude, and ultimately contributed to this hierarchical structure of governmental satisfaction. By exploiting a quasi-exogenous variation of intensity of censorship in rural Vietnam, this article shows that an information environment more biased against local governments may lead to a larger difference in satisfaction to central relative to local governments. It is also displayed that people with higher-level of education are more susceptible to this biased information environment.

When do recruitment windfalls strengthen organizations while threatening their leader’s perception of success? This paper introduces a theory of grassroots-driven organizational change that is broadly applicable when leaders balance short-term survival with long-term mission focus.

I introduce the concept of the \say{personnel resource curse} in which recruitment windfalls simultaneously strengthen an organization while undermining the leader’s ability to achieve their goals. I argue that upward- driving internal pressures caused by incomplete socialization of grassroots members can transform the priorities and operational focus of resource-constrained organizations. When this happens, leaders experience pressure to reorient their organization towards the preferences of the base, even if these preferences are not the same as the leader’s vision. The process and outcome are surprising, as the theory identifies contexts in which even strategic leaders will recruit cohorts that exceed their socializing capacity and who will subsequently initiate this change process. An undertheorized avenue of organizational change, grassroots-driven, and bottom-up transformational pressures can constrain group operations, produce internal stressors, and influence the trajectory of political and social movements.

The dissertation uses a multimethod approach to build a general theory of organizational transformation. I introduce the theory and frame the dissertation using case studies and a simple formal model of leader-recruit negotiation. The heart of this theory is a negotiation-centric view of organizations, in which leaders require at least some degree of consent from the rank-and-file to adopt specific actions. This approach leads to a model of organizational decision making that is sensitive to changes in leverage and introduces avenues through which leaders can be induced to accommodate the preferences of members whose presence is critical to the organization’s effectiveness. The model of organizational transformation developed in this dissertation is applicable in a wide range of contexts, from militant groups struggling to operate and expand, to issue-based organizations that seek an influx of resources and skills, to decentralized political organizations that lack strong mechanisms of control and socialization. To demonstrate generality, this dissertation presents the results of a survey of United States-based non-profit leaders and managers, finding that experience with these dynamics is prevalent in the sample.

Understanding the impact of grassroots-driven and bottom-up transformational pressures on the evolution of organizations has a wide array of implications, from philosophical questions about how organizations maintain their identity and priorities to tactical conclusions about how to best nurture or combat organizations undergoing internal transformations. The research makes theoretical and empirical contributions to social scientific theories about organizational dynamics and the evolution of organizations.