My dissertation, which follows the three-paper format, studies the ways in which Chinese citizens interact with local government agencies and how this impacts their perceptions of regime legitimacy. All titles below are tentative, and may change in the course of revision and on the track to publication.
Paper 1: “Results May Vary: Satisfaction with Petitioning Channels in Authoritarian China”
This paper uses data from the Asian Barometer Survey to evaluate whether people who have engaged with Chinese citizen service institutions have a more favorable view of the political system’s legitimacy. The results show that people who have contacted local officials in the recent past have a more favorable view of the way governance works in China, while those who have contacted higher officials have a more negative view. Petitioning appears to have a heterogeneous effect, with recent petitioners skewing toward both high support and low support. These findings, though observational in nature, nonetheless fit together with a broader picture in the Chinese Politics literature, whereby the government is taking a firmer stance against contention while still appeasing some forms of expression within the system.
Paper 2: “When Responses Are Not Responsive: Communication and Performative Governance on the Chinese ‘Message Board for Leaders’”
This paper is a mixed-methods analysis of an original sample of letters and replies on China’s Message Board for Leaders (领导留言板). In this paper, I argue for the importance of unresponsive and partially responsive replies, which answer a citizen’s message but do not deliver a full solution. The justifications these replies give—which range from providing new information to using the law as a shield—highlight a neglected way in which citizen-service institutions aim to defuse unrest without solving problems, thereby using responsiveness as a tool of soft control. This manuscript serves as my job market paper in the 2023-2024 hiring cycle.
Paper 3: “The Mayor’s Dilemma: Troublemakers and Rule-Followers Petitioning an Authoritarian Bureaucracy”
This paper develops a formal model of citizen-state interaction in an extended-form game to synthesize the findings of Papers 1 and 2. The model identifies the parameters under which an authoritarian local government will respond effectively to citizen input in the absence of electoral accountability, which drives good governance in most formal models in the literature. I primarily shape this model around petitioning channels like the Mayor’s Mailboxes and the Message Board for Leaders, which do not themselves pose collective action risks to the system, but it also has implications for non-electoral posts in bureaucratic democracies.
