You have mentioned your interest in political communication in non-democracies. What are some aspects of political communication that you find especially interesting?
My research primarily focuses on deliberation and responsiveness in non-democracies. I am curious as to why dictators invest in deliberative institutions designed to answer citizen grievances, under what circumstances these institutions would help citizens resolve their problems, and perhaps more importantly, how these deliberative institutions shape citizen attitude towards the regime and their political behaviors.
Beyond deliberation and responsiveness, I’m also interested in other communication strategies (e.g. education, media) that authoritarian regimes use to secure citizen compliance. For example, I’m currently working on a paper studying the political behavior of teachers at Confucius Institutes (CI), the Chinese government’s overseas program for cultural and language promotion. The prevailing view in media and policy writings is that the Chinese regime prescribes specific actions that CI teachers must take (e.g. censorship) when encountering politically sensitive questions. However, using interviews, a global survey, and experimental methods among CI teachers in over 70 countries, we find that the Chinese regime only prescribes broad goals to CI teachers, such as “defending China’s national interests,” without specifying how to pursue these goals behaviorally. We also find that under these ambiguous instructions, men and women CI teachers choose divergent behaviors to advance the regime's goals.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges to development in non-democracies?
Development is a huge topic. I’m only able to provide some observations based on my research about authoritarian responsiveness. In this area, the biggest challenge I observe is still the lack of institutional channels for citizens to hold the government accountable. It is a sign of development that authoritarian governments are investing increasingly in deliberation channels, online and offline, for citizens to express grievances and demand public service. While less than 10% of appeals in my sample receive a substantive response from the government, it also shows that some citizens do get their problems resolved through these participation channels.
Yet, when authoritarian officials fail to provide substantive responses, citizens have no legal, formal channels to punish officials. In democracies, unsatisfied petitioners can vote for the opposing party in the next election, expose government unresponsiveness to media outlets, and even sue the government in court. However, in autocracies, these methods of punishment are weak or absent. Some citizens may use non-institutional methods to punish the government, such as protesting or exposing official misconduct on social media. But these behaviors, which aim to attract a lot of public attention, are often cracked down on if they achieve this goal. Without credible punishment from the bottom-up, authoritarian officials treat these deliberative institutions as a tool for their social control rather than a channel to serve the public.
My research also finds that the Chinese central government does conduct regular audits on government responsiveness at the local level. But this top-down monitoring is largely symbolic and focuses on the quantity rather than the quality of officials’ responses to citizens. Therefore, I think that to improve government responsiveness in non-democracies, it is still crucial that the customers of these deliberation channels, that is, citizens, have some formal, legal channels to punish officials when officials fail to resolve the appealed problems.
Your robust research methodology includes qualitative interviews, archival research, computational methods with large-scale datasets, and survey and field experiments. How did you develop this approach?
My PhD department (Political Science) provides us with many training opportunities for both quantitative and qualitative methods since our first year in the program. Our course sequences in quantitative methods and formal theory introduced me to a variety of powerful analysis tools and causal inference designs. I’ve also received quantitative training from the departments of Statistics, Communication, and Computer Science. In particular, the methods courses taught by Prof. Jennifer Pan and Prof. Dan Jurafsky helped me lay a good foundation for skills in web-scraping and natural language processing.
My qualitative training started from the Chinese politics course sequence taught by Prof. Jean Oi. Later on, I continuously learned from Prof. Oi every time I talked with her about doing fieldwork in China. She guided me to extract and focus on the “big question” from lots of seemingly unstructured details I collected in the field, and she also gave me many helpful suggestions on what homework I should do before going to the field, how to approach people in the field, and how to design my questions and learn to improvise during the interviews.
This combination of quantitative and qualitative training has made me a strong believer in mixed-methods research. I think that quantitative methods are powerful in showing systematic patterns and qualitative methods are powerful in uncovering the mechanism underlying these patterns. Moreover, qualitative fieldwork has helped me a lot in understanding how things actually get done at the micro level (e.g. the step-by-step workflow of a specific bureau within a municipal government when handling a citizen appeal), which I think is useful for identifying important research questions and developing hypotheses before collecting data systematically.
