Working Papers
Brown, Junius F. 2024. “When Responses Are Not Responsive: Explanatory Responsiveness as Performative Governance.”
Abstract:
Studies of constituency service responsiveness tend to focus on material results: The person soliciting help either gets what they want, or gets turned away. While acknowledging the importance of this substantive responsiveness, I draw attention to what I call explanatory responses: those in which the government provides a detailed reply explaining why a more complete solution was not possible. Far from merely saying no with many words, these replies represent a channel through which state agents can assuage disgruntled citizens even when unable to solve their problems. By analyzing the rhetoric which state agents deploy in these replies, we obtain a window into the way a government seeks to legitimize itself under public pressure. Drawing on a sample of 2,003 letter-reply pairs on China’s Message Board for Leaders, I identify three common forms of explanatory responsiveness: disputing facts, providing context, and using the law as a shield. While I discuss these discursive tactics primarily in the context of Chinese politics, I argue that the explanatory responsiveness framework also has important implications for understanding citizen-state interaction in multi-party democracies.
Elevator pitch: The excuses which local governments make when unable to solve a problem tell us about the nature of state-society communication in China.
Status: Undergoing revision.
Brown, Junius F. 2024. “Law as a Shield: How Chinese Local Governments Use Legality to Deflect Public Pressure.”
Abstract:
Most literature on authoritarianism treats law as a weapon which citizens can wield against state power. But state agents can also invoke law to justify their actions (or inaction) in the face of citizen complaints. I term this behavior “using the law as a shield” and illustrate it using mixed-methods analysis of a hand-coded sample of more than 2,000 letters and replies on China’s Message Board for Leaders, an online citizen service portal. Replies that invoke the law can use it to convert moral complaints into technical questions, or to meet citizens’ legal rhetoric head-on. Statistical testing reveals that authorities are more likely to invoke legality against letters that demonstrated legal awareness, though most legalistic replies address citizens who did not. These findings show how the Chinese government in particular, and state authorities in general, can use legality to legitimize their behavior even when rule of law remains weak.
Elevator pitch: Introduces the concept of “Law as a Shield,” linking it to literature on legality and legitimation.
Status: Job market paper for Fall 2025 hiring cycle.
Early Projects
Explanatory Responsiveness Survey Experiment (ERSE)
Description:
This project is a follow-up to the “Explanatory Responsiveness” and “Law as a Shield” working papers above. In it, I will conduct an online survey of Chinese netizens, presenting them with realistic scenarios of imperfect government responsiveness and asking them whether they consider these responses satisfactory. Respondents will be randomly assigned to slightly different government responses, allowing me to compare the satisfaction rates when local state agents justify their imperfect responsiveness in different ways. The survey will also include descriptive questions about citizens’ recent political participation, their familiarity with various official input channels, and aspects of their personalities.
This experiment will test two sets of hypotheses speaking to different literatures: one on whether the legality discourse I document in “Law as a Shield” is effective at bolstering state legitimacy among legally-minded citizens, and one on how right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation moderate netizens’ reactions to the Chinese Communist Party’s legal rhetoric. These sets of hypotheses will form the basis for two working papers—or, given the stability afforded by a tenure-track position, a book project which explores these topics more deeply.
Status: I have secured funding and a research assistant for this project, and I am currently drafting the survey questions. I will solicit feedback on the questions and survey design at APSA 2025 in Vancouver, so if you’re planning to attend, I’m happy to chat! Survey distribution is tentatively scheduled for Winter 2025-2026.
