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"Governance is a problem of political control. For governments, the problem is how to control society: how to maintain order, enforce laws, collect revenue, and implement policy. For citizens, the problem is how to control their governments: how to ensure that political leaders respond to their demands and are held accountable if they do not. This problem of political control is especially severe in autocracies like China, where the state reaches further into people's everyday lives and where citizens have fewer avenues for holding officials accountable than in most democracies"--

Political decentralization is often argued to strengthen political accountability by bringing government closer to the people. Social and civic institutions at the local level, such as lineage associations, temples, churches, or social clubs, can make it easier for citizens to monitor officials and hold them accountable. This article argues that strong social institutions also empower local elites who may use their informal influence to control their group and capture rents. Drawing on evidence from case studies of Chinese villages, the article shows that lineage group leaders who become village officials use their combination of social and political authority to confiscate villagers' land. Evidence from a survey experiment suggests that endorsement of a land confiscation plan by lineage elites elicits greater compliance with property seizures. A national survey indicates that when a lineage leader becomes a village cadre, it is associated with a 14 to 20 percent increase in the likelihood of a land expropriation. The findings demonstrate how informal institutions and local civil society can be tools of top-down political control. (World Politics / SWP)

AbstractThe leaders of authoritarian states face a dilemma between building a loyal military to guard against domestic threats and a professional military that can guard against foreign threats. In this article, I argue that leaders respond to domestic threats by promoting loyal officers and to foreign threats by promoting experienced officers. I draw on a new dataset, the first of its kind, of over 12,000 appointments to the People's Liberation Army of China. The data show that career ties and combat experience are critical for officer promotion to key military and party offices. However, in periods of high domestic threat, party leaders promote unusually large numbers of officers with personal ties to the top leader. In periods of foreign threat, on the other hand, leaders are more likely to promote officers with prior combat experience. The article challenges the conventional wisdom, showing how autocrats face a trade‐off between guarding against internal and external threats.

How do authoritarian states implement policies that curb individual freedom? In this article, I examine the implementation of the One Child Policy in China, which has had an enormous impact on Chinese society and yet has received little attention from political scientists. I argue that
the success or failure of the policy hinged on using frontline bureaucrats to infiltrate society. Important theories suggest that bureaucratic penetration may increase bureaucrats' responsiveness to citizens and decrease implementation of the law. Drawing on a unique dataset and natural experiment,
I show the opposite to be true in China: a one standard deviation increase in bureaucratic penetration lowers over-quota births by 2 to 7 percentage points. There is suggestive evidence that bureaucrats leverage their social embeddedness to control society. The article shows how frontline
bureaucrats beyond the police, military, or ruling party are key agents of repression and political control.

This dissertation investigates the origins of state power and political accountability. How do states exercise political control over their populations and implement policies that have clear winners and losers? Do democratic institutions in combination with a strong civil society strengthen political accountability? I examine these questions in the context of rural China, which combines limited local democracy and vibrant non-state groups such as kinship associations, temples, and neighborhood groups. Many argue that strong civil society institutions and local elections can curb the power of the state and hold government officials accountable. However, in this dissertation I argue that in China, strong civil society groups and village elections have expanded state power and helped officials confiscate wealth. The first part of the dissertation develops my theory of state power. Drawing on new data from rural China, I show that citizens distrust the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and believe that local party cadres do not represent their interests. On the other hand, the leaders of local civil society, especially the leaders of clans and neighborhood groups, enjoy high degrees of trust and moral authority. I argue that in this context, elected village councils and other participatory institutions are a mechanism for the state to identify local elites with significant informal authority within social groups. Once they join local political institutions, rent-sharing gives these social elites incentives to use their informal authority to help the CCP elicit compliance with potentially unpopular policies.In subsequent chapters, I draw on a mix of structured case studies and a unique national dataset to show how co-opting civil society elites has helped the CCP seize land from village collectives. These land expropriations have redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth from village collectives to the state and to local elites, and are one of the central political issues in contemporary China. I show how the leaders of clans, religious groups, and neighborhoods use their informal authority within their groups to elicit compliance with land confiscations. When these civil society leaders are included in village political institutions, land expropriations are more likely and the compensation for these expropriations is lower.These findings cast doubt on theories that hold that the main consequence of civil society institutions is to enhance political accountability. I argue that grassroots civil society institutions are encouraged and nurtured by the powerful because they reinforce the authority of local elites and because they help elites to control society. I also challenge theories that hold that democratic and participatory institutions curb the power of the state. Instead, these institutions can be used by authoritarian regimes to co-opt civil society leaders, who can help the state implement policies that redistribute wealth from the grassroots to elites.

AbstractHow does public diplomacy shape global public opinion? In this note, we theorize that positive public diplomacy that emphasizes aid and friendship works, while negative messages that criticize international rivals are ineffective. We conduct an experiment, to our knowledge the first of its kind, that randomly exposes Indian citizens to real Twitter messages from Chinese diplomats. We find that positive messages emphasizing aid and friendship improve perceptions of China, even in times of escalating violent conflict. However, messages from so-called "Wolf Warrior" diplomats that harshly criticize the United States are ineffective and can backfire in times of crisis. We argue public diplomacy can be a useful tool for global powers, but that domestic political pressures have pushed some diplomats, like China's Wolf Warriors, toward nationalist messages that do not appeal to foreign audiences.

An influential body of scholarship argues that authoritarian regimes design "hard" propaganda that is intentionally heavy-handed in order to signal regime power. In this study, by contrast, we link the power of propaganda to the emotional power of "soft" propaganda such as television dramas and viral social media content. We conduct a series of experiments in which we expose over 6800 respondents in China to real propaganda videos drawn from television dramas, state-backed social media accounts, and state-run newscasts, each containing nationalist messages favored by the Chinese Communist Party. In contrast to theories that propaganda is unpersuasive, we show that propaganda effectively manipulates anger as well as anti-foreign sentiment and behavior, with heightened anti-foreign attitudes persisting up to a week. However, we also find that nationalist propaganda has no effect on perceptions of Chinese government performance or on self-reported willingness to protest against the state.

Political leaders use different tactics to ensure widespread compliance with state policies and to minimize resistance. Scholarship tends to treat different tactics individually, suggesting fundamental dissimilarities in underpinning logic and goals. We introduce political control as a concept that unifies these different tactics within a single framework and demonstrate the analytical utility of considering seemingly disparate strategies in conversation rather than in isolation. We synthesize a growing recent literature on political control, including innovative approaches to repression as well as studies of indoctrination, distribution, and infiltration. We argue that tactics of political control can be understood to vary along two primary dimensions: the level of violence and the materiality of state actions. We highlight recent inquiry into the downstream effects of political control. We conclude with a call for more research on political control that considers combinations of different tactics, across regime types, in a world where tolerance of violent repression is diminishing.