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.
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.
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.
Authoritarian regimes use censorship to prevent people from accessing unfavorable content. We argue that censorship, when detected by citizens, will have an adverse impact on their assessment of the ...government because censorship signals the government's inability to address the issue being censored. Using an online survey experiment conducted in China, we find that censorship awareness significantly decreases people's willingness to seek assistance from the government when needs arise. In addition, our survey respondents find a piece of news more credible when they believe that it is censored by the state. The findings suggest that censorship likely lowers people's evaluation of the government's problem-solving ability.
Why would dictators purge members of their ruling coalition? Some argue that doing so can minimize the risk to dictators’ political survival, while others contend that dictators who mount purges are ...motivated by the desire to share resources with fewer allies. In this study, we analyze an original dataset, compiled from biographical data on the subordinates of the founding emperors of seven ancient Chinese imperial dynasties. Analyzing the data with competing risks models, we find that military experience is a strong predictor of political purges. Emperors were less likely to execute officers who had fought in more battles, but more likely to execute commanders, especially those who had established military credentials prior to the founding of an empire. In addition, the incidence of political purges heightened toward the end of an emperor’s life, which implies that the founding emperors were concerned about the security threats against their designated successors. Potential challengers came not only from the military, but also from the aristocracy. Indeed, we find that the blood relatives of the emperors were more likely to experience a mild form of purges: deprivation of titles. These findings suggest that dictators are more likely to use purges to reduce existential threats.
Income inequality has long been suggested as a crucial factor in determining political participation. This study focuses on the case of Hong Kong, a city with notoriously high level of inequality. To ...examine the effect of inequality on participation, we construct a novel District Income Inequality dataset that estimates inequality at the local district level, providing a more nuanced and accurate analysis of the level of inequality experienced by individuals on a daily basis, instead of the region-wide situation. By focusing on the election-to-election change in district-level inequality, it is found that inequality depresses participation in legislative elections. The results are also robust at the individual-level, with survey data demonstrating that people living in districts with higher inequality were less likely to vote.
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.
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