To authoritarian rulers, holding somewhat competitive elections enhances legitimacy, but entails political risks. Committing electoral fraud can secure victory, but may jeopardize regime legitimacy. ...However, there is a tool of electoral manipulation that allows authoritarian rulers to reduce electoral risk while preserving legitimacy: gerrymandering. This article undertakes a systematic study of gerrymandering in Hong Kong, using a dataset that documents boundary changes at the level of residential buildings. The empirical findings show a significant partisan bias in electoral redistricting: opposition constituencies are more likely to be redistricted. Redistricting, however, fails to deter opposition incumbents from seeking re-election. No significant negative relationship is found between redistricting and opposition incumbents’ vote share, although redistricting does reduce their overall chances of re-election. The results suggest that gerrymandering, which involves the use of packing and cracking strategies in different districts, can be employed to undermine the aggregate electoral performance of the opposition parties.
Objective
In this article, we explore the seldom studied concept of “distant participation,” defined as the experience of social movements (such as receiving information from online media) from ...overseas. Online media may affect people's political attitudes, but how people use online media is also contingent upon their political attitudes.
Method
We take advantage of a natural experiment to deal with this endogenous selection problem. Our treatment group consists of college students who happened to join a short‐term overseas exchange program during the Umbrella Movement, which had an unexpectedly large turnout in Hong Kong. These students had a different mode of participation in the event from their peers physically in Hong Kong. The experience, including intensive exposure to online media, changed their media consumption habits, and hence their political attitudes.
Results
We find that the treatment group is more likely to report using online media to obtain news. They also have a stronger sense of political efficacy and significantly weaker national identity. We, however, find no significant difference between the treatment and control groups regarding civic and political participation.
Conclusion
This study provides a rare contribution to the study of the effect of online media by tackling the problem of selection. The concept of distant participation should also be given more attention given the ease of population flow and technological advancement nowadays.
Some attribute China's rapid economic growth to a cadre promotion system that rewards economic performance. Others argue that political promotion in China hinges on factionalism. Extant empirical ...studies often assume that performance can be measured independently from the effect of factionalism. We test the validity of this assumption by examining whether local cadres’ economic performance would change as a result of losing vertical ties to a higher authority. We find an immediate increase in the growth rates of local GDP and government revenue. However, the performance change is mediated by the type of succeeding leaders, as it occurs only under locally promoted leaders who have existing ties with the local cadres. We further examine various channels through which a leader's insider status may affect local economic performance and find that newly appointed outsider leaders would cut fiscal transfers to the local level, which may explain the drop in their short‐term performance.
Scholars of electoral autocracies accord far more attention to post-election protests than pre-election ones, as the former have the potential to trigger a regime transition. We argue that ...pre-election protests can have a significant effect on election outcomes. In particular, they are likely to deepen social cleavages along two dimensions: age and immigrant status. The 2019 social unrest in Hong Kong provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the electoral impact of pre-election protests. Comparing public opinion data related to the 2019 and 2015 District Council elections, we find strong empirical support for our argument, as immigrant status and age are strong predictors of voting choices and voter turnout. Our findings imply that exposure to democratic protests may not help in bridging the gap in political attitudes between immigrants and natives.
Despite heavy Internet regulations, government critics and political satires are not completely absent in the cyberspace of most authoritarian regimes. Some argue that these regimes deliberately ...tolerate somewhat critical online comments as a way to monitor mass sentiments. To counterbalance critics’ influences, they often mobilize and amplify pro-regime voices. We empirically examine whether such pro-regime voices succeed in changing public opinions in favor of the authorities. Based on two online surveys and an embedded survey experiment that we implemented in China, we find that when given a choice, our Chinese respondents self-select to expose themselves to comments that deviate from the official discourses. In addition, exposure to diverse comments undermines individuals’ policy support. The findings call into question the effectiveness of the “soft propaganda” that authoritarian regimes orchestrate in cyberspace.
Localist parties have become an emerging force in Hong Kong's political landscape. What has caused the rise of localism in the city? Extant studies focus on cultural and social factors. In this ...article, we propose a political economy explanation: global and regional economic factors have caused a housing boom in Hong Kong since the mid-2000s and produced impactful redistributive consequences. While homeowners benefit tremendously from the hike in asset prices, non-homeowners stand to lose. Their divergent economic interests then translate into political preferences; homeowners support political parties that favour the status quo, while non-homeowners tend to support those that challenge it. Using a newly available public opinion survey, we find preliminary evidence in support of our argument. In particular, homeowners are less likely to identify with localist parties and tend to vote for pro-establishment ones. High-income earners, however, are more likely to vote for localist parties.
Migration to electoral autocracies has become increasingly common. Extant studies, however, accord little attention to the immigrants' influences on the domestic politics of these regimes. We argue ...that immigrants have attributes (status quo bias and lack of prior exposure to local politics) that make them an attractive co-optation target of the authoritarian regime. We provide a case study of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong to illustrate our argument. Since the sovereignty transfer, the Hong Kong government has devised various schemes to attract these immigrants, while pro-establishment political parties and groups have actively sought to co-opt them. Using two distinct public opinion surveys, we also find that immigrants are more likely to approve of the political and economic status quo, and less likely to vote for pro-democracy opposition parties than the natives. In addition, we find no evidence that exposure to political information can change the immigrants' vote choice.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
To Compete or to Cooperate HOK-WUI WONG, STAN; OR, NICK H. K.
Communist and post-communist studies,
12/2020, Letnik:
53, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a multiparty authoritarian election, candidates of the ruling coalition may cooperate with each other to defeat the opposition. Alternatively, they may compete against each other, as their support ...bases often overlap. To what extent would they compete or cooperate? Using disaggregate election data from Hong Kong, we conduct a systematic analysis of the intra-elite dynamics in elections. We find that the ruling coalition in Hong Kong has strived to suppress intra-camp competition in order to optimize nominations and vote division. We also find, however, that proestablishment parties increasingly guard against each other, which makes within-camp, cross-party coordination more difficult.
Whether local officials in China are promoted on a meritocratic basis has been the subject of long-standing debate. Merit is commonly gauged by a leader's ability to deliver local GDP growth. ...Although some find economic performance to be a strong predictor of the career success of local leaders, we argue that the existing measure, which focuses on the promotion outcome of a single career step, is problematic because the career success of individual local leaders is seldom determined by a single promotion, or the lack thereof. We propose an alternative measure that is more suitable for China's political context: the length of time until promotion. Analysing the time it takes to gain promotion for four types of local leaders, we find that good economic performance is associated with a shorter time until promotion. However, the cumulative time-reducing effect of economic performance is far from significant, as it is generally insufficient to help local leaders overcome the age ceiling for promotion.
Do anti-regime protests in electoral autocracies benefit the opposition by shifting the political preference of the bystanders? We seek an answer to this question by examining the electoral impact of ...Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement. Analyzing the election outcomes at the polling-station level shortly after the movement, we find that protest exposure, as measured by spatial proximity to protest sites, is positively correlated with the decline of electoral support for the opposition. Individual level surveys indicate that the adverse influences of protest exposure manifest themselves in elevating by-standing citizens' sense of economic insecurity, even though the movement causes no persistent income loss, while enhancing political efficacy.
PDF
