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Research Spotlight
Let the Public Govern AI
By using the tools of deliberative democracy, Alice Siu says everyday users, not just industry moguls, can and should contribute meaningfully to important decisions about technology governance.
Fabricated Justice: How Due Process Reform Enables Evidence Manipulation
Using evidence from Mexico, Beatriz Magaloni and Esteban Salmón examine when and how abusive criminal justice practices persist under democracy, even after significant institutional reform.
Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions
Didi Kuo explains why — despite their shortcomings — strong political parties with roots in society are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth.
This article studies whether pure legality, stripped of normative components that are central to the rule of law, can convey perceived legitimacy to governmental institutions and activity. Through a survey experiment conducted among urban Chinese residents, it examines whether such conveyance is possible under current sociopolitical conditions in which the party-state continues to invest in pure legality without imposing legal checks on the party leadership’s political power and without corresponding investment in substantive rights or freedoms. Among survey respondents, government investment in professional and consistent law enforcement conveys meaningful amounts of political legitimacy. In fact, it does so even when it supports government activity, such as censorship of online speech, that is freedom depriving and socially controversial and even when such investment does not necessarily enhance the external predictability of state behavior. However, the legitimacy-enhancing effects of pure legality are likely weaker than those of state investment in procedural justice.
American Journal of Political Science,
May 23, 2025
The rise of social media in the digital era poses unprecedented challenges to authoritarian regimes that aim to influence public attitudes and behaviors. To address these challenges, we argue that authoritarian regimes have adopted a decentralized approach to produce and disseminate propaganda on social media. In this model, tens of thousands of government workers and insiders are mobilized to produce and disseminate propaganda, and content flows in a multidirectional, rather than a top-down manner. We empirically demonstrate the existence of this new model in China by creating a novel data set of over five million videos from over 18,000 regime-affiliated accounts on Douyin, a popular social media platform in China. This paper supplements prevailing understandings of propaganda by showing theoretically and empirically how digital technologies are transforming not only the content of propaganda, but also how propaganda materials are produced and disseminated.
