Great Regimes
Reckoning with Reality: Correcting National Overconfidence in a Rising Power
Haifeng Huang
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do the public in a rising authoritarian power overestimate their country's reputation, power, and influence in the world? Excessive national overconfidence has both domestic and international consequences, but it has rarely been systematically studied. Using two studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and another conducted later, I show that the Chinese public widely and systematically overestimate China's global reputation and soft power, even during a national crisis. Critically, informing Chinese citizens of actual international public opinion of China substantially corrects these perceptions. It also moderately alters their evaluations of China, its governing system, and their expectations for the country's role in the world. These effects from simple information interventions are not fleeting, suggesting that overconfidence can be meaningfully corrected and triumphalism mitigated. The findings have both theoretical significance and important policy implications.
How Exiles Mobilize Domestic Dissent
Elizabeth Nugent & Alexandra Siegel
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How can exiles mobilize dissent back home? We argue that internet communication technologies enable exiles to play an instigator role in domestic contentious politics. Analyzing the behavior of three types of social media users — influencers, amplifiers, and consumers — we explore how Egyptian exiles participated in a cascade of online dissent that culminated in sizable anti-regime protests in September 2019. Analyses of large-scale digital trace data from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube demonstrate that exiles were central to the introduction and amplification of oppositional content, facilitating its circulation among a domestic audience that then localized the content by linking it with place-based calls for protest. Our findings suggest that content produced and amplified by exiles facilitates coordination among domestic opposition and challenges the supporting role typically ascribed to opposition abroad.
Political Control in the Workplace: How Autocrats Use Firms to Discipline Citizens
Ye Zhang
MIT Working Paper, August 2025
Abstract:
How do authoritarian regimes maintain control as their private sectors grow? While existing research emphasizes control mechanisms outside the private sector such as security forces and surveillance, less is known about how the regime extends control from within it. This study examines China's use of Communist Party cells to penetrate firms and shape employee behavior. An original panel of 1,208 publicly listed private enterprises (2012-2022) shows that while party cells have expanded rapidly, they exert little influence on firm behavior. Yet employee-level evidence tells a different story. Even weak and ritualized party cells increase the visibility of the party and heighten employees' sense of being monitored. Survey experiments show that merely priming the presence of a party cell suppresses dissent and increases perceived risks in workplace discussions. These findings highlight a subtle strategy by one-party regimes to reconcile market growth with political control: targeting individuals, not business, and ruling through presence, not punishment.
Pushing Back or Backing Down? Evidence on Donor Responses to Restrictive NGO Legislation
Lucy Right, Jeremy Springman & Erik Wibbels
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
As authoritarianism has spread globally, government efforts to stifle civic space have increased dramatically. Among the most alarming tactics has been the spread of restrictive laws targeting NGOs. While such laws threaten the core objectives of many foreign donors, they have become especially common in aid-dependent nations. How do foreign donors react to this assault on their local and international implementing partners? On the one hand, democracy-promoting donors might push back, ramping up support for advocacy in defiance of draconian measures. Alternatively, when aspiring autocrats make it difficult to work with local partners, donors might back down, decreasing support for democracy promotion. Testing these arguments using dyadic data on aid flows, an original data set of NGO laws, and a variety of research designs, we find that the donors most committed to democracy promotion back down in the face of restrictive NGO laws, reducing democracy aid by 70 percent in the years after laws are enacted. Our findings suggest that donor behavior creates strong incentives for backsliding governments in aid-receiving countries to use legislation to crack down on civil society.
Two-layer panopticon: How the Chinese government uses digital surveillance to prevent collective action
Han Zhang
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Authoritarian regimes increasingly use digital surveillance to suppress collective action. Existing accounts emphasize how dictators use mass surveillance of citizens to gather information and deter mobilization, but overlook their continued reliance on human agents, whose shirking often undermines repression. We propose a two-layer Panopticon framework for digital surveillance. Dictators can directly surveil citizens. They can also surveil the frontline agents responsible for implementing repression, reducing shirking and improving prevention. We test this framework in China using an original dataset of 51,611 government procurement contracts that captures digital workplace surveillance of agents alongside mass surveillance of citizens. We find that each layer independently reduces protest and that their interaction produces modestly reinforcing effects. Causal mediation analysis reveals an asymmetric mechanism: about one-third of the protest-reducing effect of citizen surveillance operates through increased oversight of agents, while agent-facing surveillance reduces protest directly. These results remain robust across dynamic panel models, instrumental variables, and alternative protest data. This article bridges and extends research on state repression, principal-agent problems in bureaucracy, and digital authoritarianism, offering new theoretical and empirical insights into how digital technologies strengthen the practice of authoritarian rule.
AI for Persuasion? How Policy Endorsement From Large Language Models Increases Citizens' Compliance Willingness in China
Miao Xiang & Shouzhi Xia
Policy Studies Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The voluntary compliance of ordinary citizens is pivotal for the seamless implementation of public policy and the achievement of desired policy outcomes. Government agencies often rely on expert endorsement in policy communication to bolster public support. However, recent scholarship indicates a decline in the perceived credibility of experts, particularly in China. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), this paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can notably endorse public policy and influence citizens' compliance willingness. Leveraging two controversial policies in China, we pre-registered and performed two survey experiments. The findings reveal that policy endorsement from LLMs, especially Chinese LLMs, can effectively enhance public support for controversial policies, whereas endorsement from experts shows no significant effect. Moreover, exploratory analyses reveal that the improvement in public evaluation of the scientific nature of policymaking may mediate this causal relationship. This paper sheds light on the potential implications of AI on policy communication and citizens' policy perceptions.
Founding Leaders and National Narratives: Anthropomorphism and the Roots of Founding Leader Personality Cults in Three East Asian Cases
Paul Schuler et al.
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Founding leader personality cults are crucial components of national narratives. Yet, relatively little research examines how they emerge. A small political science literature argues that cults follow a personalization of power to dominate society and induce loyalty. We argue this conceptualization explains late-stage cults. We theorize that rival elites sometimes intentionally promote a leader's image prior to personalization to generate emotional connections to the masses. We call these cults of legitimation. To explain why elites concede to cults that could erode their own power, we apply social psychology research to argue that personality cults can generate greater emotional attachment to an abstract group -- in this case a nation -- by anthropomorphizing it. Symbols alone are less powerful in this regard. Using Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, we process trace cult emergence to demonstrate the plausibility of our theory. Our paper provides a new perspective on a visible, undertheorized component of authoritarian rule.
The Impact of Freedom of Speech on Conspiracy Beliefs
Paul Bertin et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conspiracy beliefs are often portrayed as a threat to democracies. However, less is known about the extent to which the state of democracy may affect conspiracy beliefs. Hence, we investigated the impact of the societal level of freedom of speech on conspiracy beliefs. In Study 1, using aggregated nation-level data (N = 68 countries), we found that conspiracy beliefs were higher in countries with lower population support for and lower expert-estimated freedom of speech. However, this effect was no longer significant after controlling for two confounders: corruption and electoral democracy. In Study 2a (N = 190, preregistered), inducing low (vs. high) freedom of speech increased conspiracy beliefs in a fictional society. We replicated this effect in Study 2b (N = 90, preregistered), extending it to generic conspiracy beliefs. In Study 3a (N = 436, preregistered), we successfully designed a new induction of freedom of speech in an ecological setting but failed to replicate its effect on conspiracy beliefs. We adjusted this new experimental material in Study 3b (N = 498, preregistered) and observed higher conspiracy beliefs under low freedom of speech, compared to the high freedom of speech and control conditions, which did not differ. Hence, the effect stemmed from low freedom of speech increasing conspiracy beliefs, rather than high freedom of speech reducing them. In Studies 2-3, the effect of freedom of speech remained significant when controlling for perceptions of democracy, highlighting the unique nature of this societal factor in shaping conspiracy beliefs. We discuss freedom of speech as a way to mitigate conspiracy beliefs.
Meritocracy and Autocratic Power-sharing: A Historical Perspective
Clair Yang, Yasheng Huang & Zhaomin Li
MIT Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
This paper proposes meritocracy as a power-sharing institution in authoritarian regimes, particularly in weakly institutionalized environments. Contrary to what Enlightenment scholars believed, our evidence shows that meritocratic institutions were not uncommon in historical states and were often associated with absolute rulers. Using a formal model, we demonstrate that meritocracy benefits rulers by enabling them to co-opt high-ability agents, and it can remain credible even without third-party enforcement mechanisms. Unlike other power-sharing institutions, such as parliaments, which function more effectively under weaker rulers, meritocracy is more likely to emerge endogenously under strong rulers and remains self-reinforcing over time. We test these theoretical predictions using historical case studies and empirical analysis of a panel of 289 historical polities. The results confirm a positive association between meritocracy and autocracy. We believe that meritocracy can fill the gap in the literature to explain power-sharing in many historical absolute regimes.
From Bullets to Balance Sheets: How Military Involvement in the Economy Shapes Leader Survival
Roya Izadi
International Studies Quarterly, December 2025
Abstract:
From producing consumer goods to managing clubs, banks, and other for-profit firms, many militaries generate revenues that are not part of the military budget and are far removed from the realm of military affairs, and have adverse consequences for societies. Despite their significance, causes and consequences of such activities are largely unexplored. This article investigates the impact of military economic activities on propensity for coups. It argues that as the military expands its role in the economy, it gains both the incentives and opportunities to stage coups. However, this effect varies by rank. Military-run enterprises function as a double-edged sword: while they provide rent-seeking opportunities that reduce the likelihood of rebellion among mid- and low-ranking officers, they also embolden senior officers, for whom economic control becomes a political stake. Leaders may use economic privileges to co-opt mid and lower ranking officers, but as military builds more economic capital, senior officers become less dependent on civilian leadership and more likely to stage coups. Using an original dataset of over 2,800 economic enterprises owned/run by militaries for all countries from 1950 to 2020, I show that coup risk significantly increases as military economic involvement increases, and such coups are primarily led by senior officers.
Droughts, Conflicts, and the Importance of Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from Pre-Industrial Europe
Evan Wigton-Jones
Journal of Economic History, December 2025, Pages 1101-1137
Abstract:
This research shows that droughts are robustly associated with city-level unrest in Europe over the years 900 to 1800 CE. This relationship is non-linear, with disproportionately greater increases in the probability of a conflict among droughts in the upper tail of the severity distribution. Elected city governments are relatively immune to drought-induced conflict, while those based on representation by burghers or guilds are not. These results suggest that local governments are key to maintaining social stability during economic shocks, and are most successful when they have a greater degree of democratic legitimacy.
People versus Places: Elite Persistence after the Fall of the Ming
Carol Shiue & Wolfgang Keller
NBER Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
We study how elite power persisted through the Ming-Qing transition in Central China. Using genealogical microdata on married couples and their descendants, linked to measures of local elite influence, we estimate the effects of the Ming collapse (1368-1644) on families (people) and on regions (places). A family line-level treatment and control approach shows that elites experienced an immediate loss of influence, but their descendants recovered and consolidated elite status under the Qing (1644-1911). In contrast, a region-level design indicates that areas more heavily exposed to Ming-collapse destruction suffered persistent adverse outcomes. Evidence on career choice is consistent with a trauma-induced shift toward civil service examination careers, with stronger intergenerational transmission of exam-oriented norms in families more exposed to destruction. The results document adaptive persistence of elite families despite regime change, alongside lasting regional scarring, and highlight the role of cultural transmission in the persistence of elite status.