Why “Winners” Accommodate and “Losers” Repress: Heterogenous Career Prospects and Choices of Leaders when Facing Protests

To repress or accommodate protests is a fundamental problem that political leaders face, especially in authoritarian regimes. The literature on state repression mostly focuses on how factors such as protest characteristics and government resources influence protest outcomes. Departing from this literature, my thesis understands repression and accommodation as choices that political leaders make with their own ends in mind. Building on the literature on political selection, which takes career advancement as the main motivation of leaders, the thesis analyzes choices at the subnational level in China and investigates how heterogeneity in self-evaluated career prospects of local communist party leaders shapes their choices. The thesis employs distance to the age ceiling for promotion, age at taking office, and years in office to measure the promotion stress local party leaders experience. The thesis proposes that promotion stress encourages leaders to embrace career risks that the repression choice entails. Estimating logit models with fixed effects, the thesis finds that: (1) at the deputy provincial level, party leaders close to the age ceiling choose repression more than do young and promising party leaders; and (2) at the city level, party leaders who take up office at an age young enough that promotion is possible but still old enough to handicap them for ultimate promotion to the provincial level choose repression more compared with older party leaders with effectively no chance to reach the provincial level. The findings confirm the theorized pattern: stressed “losers” repress more at both levels and secure “winners” repress less at the deputy provincial level. The thesis contributes to our understanding of the repression choice and brings new nuance to our understanding of the impact of political selection institutions on governance choices.