Suchergebnisse

Chinese people tend to disaggregate the state and see the authoritarian leviathan as divided in terms of their high trust in the central state but much lower trust in the local state. This pattern stands interestingly in contrast to that in many mature democracies, where citizens tend to trust the local state more than the central state. While the authoritarian variant of hierarchical popular legitimacy has been identified in some Chinese as well as cross-national surveys, little has been known about its formation and its influence on mass political participation and authoritarian politics. Relatedly, little attention has been paid to the roles of the multilevel architecture of government and public perceptions of it in entrenching or subverting authoritarian rule. Leveraging quasi-experiment designs, process tracing, and statistical modeling, the three studies reported here focus on China as a case in point and aim to fill the gap in the burgeoning literature on resilient and comparative authoritarianism. Theoretically, I argue that the hierarchical popular legitimacy in China has two main contemporary sources—the unfunded populist redistribution programs launched by the central government but devolved to local governments to implement (redistributive politics), and the centralized information management permitting investigative reporting on local levels but muting criticisms toward the central government and high-level officials (information politics)—which induce the mass public to credit the central state in good times while blaming local governments in hard times. As a consequence, individuals with such a mind-set tend to seek justice from above using confrontational tactics rather than invest in demanding local democratic processes to address their grievances (contentious politics). Empirically, to test my proposition on the politics of redistribution, I exploited the agricultural tax policy change in China as a quasi-experiment and the difference-in-difference approach. The results indicate that populist redistribution policies in China elevate public trust in the central government while decreasing that in local governments. To test my proposition on information politics, I used the media exposure of an official corruption scandal in China as a natural experiment and the regression-discontinuity approach complemented with process tracing. The results show that the effectiveness of the Chinese regime's efforts to shape public opinion is largely contingent on the type of framing initiators and the timing of the state's entrance into the framing process. To test my proposition about mass political participation, I employed latent class analysis for classifications of four participatory types and multinomial logistical regressions. The results reveal that a divided leviathan in mind promotes the dramatically increasing yet routinized mass agitating political activism in recent decades. The interactions between multilevel political authorities and the mass public culminating in the making of a divided leviathan help to sustain the top-down authoritarian rule in China. By decomposing popular legitimacy vertically and connecting macro-institutional/structural processes to micro-attitudinal/behavioral dynamics, this dissertation, with its design-based empirical strategies, hopes to shed light on the sources of authoritarian survival and to provide a new avenue where the studies of authoritarian regimes, mass politics, and intergovernmental relations intersect.

AbstractThis study investigates the nexus between the rise of female leaders and the appointment of women to cabinets and how family ties, crucial for women's political ascendance, impact these appointments. Using a unique dataset across 160 countries from 1966 to 2021, we find that female leaders generally appoint more women to their cabinets and key cabinet roles. However, this effect is significantly moderated by the "Goldilocks" principle, defined by the nature of a leader's family ties. Specifically, female leaders with moderate family ties are most likely to appoint women. In contrast, their counterparts from political dynasties and those without familial political ties are less inclined to do so. The exploratory analysis suggests potential mechanisms driving this dynamic: female leaders with a "just-right" degree of political lineage are more likely to have advanced degrees and Western education, potentially aligning them more closely with liberal and feminist values.

On March 10, 2024, a 13-year-old junior high school student in Handan City, Hebei Province, China was killed and buried by three classmates under the age of 14. The method of committing the crime was cruel and had a negative social impact, once again bringing topics such as "juvenile delinquency" and "lowering the age of criminal responsibility" to the hot search. Since entering the new era, with the rapid development of the social economy, minors have shown an overall trend of "precocious puberty". The problem of juvenile delinquency and violence has also become increasingly severe, causing adverse social impacts. According to data released by the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China, juvenile delinquency in China is characterized by a sharp increase in the number of crimes, a clear trend towards younger age groups, and cruel criminal methods. The Eleventh Amendment to the Criminal Law, which came into effect in March 2021, lowered the age of criminal responsibility and individually lowered the statutory minimum age of criminal responsibility to 12 years old. Therefore, this case may become the first case to hold young minors accountable for crimes after the age of criminal responsibility has been lowered, which is of great significance to the construction of the rule of law and judicial practice. In practice, we should clarify the situation of "heinous circumstances" stipulated in the Amendment to the Criminal Law (XI), and establish an independent juvenile justice system to comprehensively and effectively correct and prevent the misconduct and illegal behavior of minors, rather than simply lowering the age of criminal responsibility. At the same time, reduce excessive interference of online public opinion in judicial trials.

AbstractThis article investigates the cultural politics of the Beijing subway. Drawing on diverse sources, we trace the evolution of the subway over the last half-century to reveal that it transcends its fluctuating, time-specific practicalities to serve as a potent conduit through which the Chinese state consistently shapes subjecthood. The article begins with the subway's Cold War inception as a military enterprise, spotlighting its deliberate concealment to safeguard the echelons of power and obscure both international and domestic tensions. The second section delves into the subway's rebirth in the wake of China's opening-up reform and rapid economic rise, as it transforms into a mobile gallery of political aesthetics that extols China's cultural heritage and triumphs, cultivating national pride under siege from unleashed market and social forces. The final section dissects the subway's orchestration of undesirable passengers, sculpting a socioeconomic hierarchy in the city's commuting system. As a multifaceted prism, the Beijing subway encapsulates a range of covert and overt, pragmatic and aesthetic, and inclusive and exclusive elements in the cultural politics of Chinese infrastructure at large; and it illustrates the sustained centrality of state power in shaping individual subjectivities and defining the cultural and representational significance of Chinese infrastructure, albeit amid growing contestation.

Civic organizations have long been heralded for promoting voluntarism and civic participation, yet observational studies, facing endogeneity concerns, have struggled to solidify the causal underpinnings of the neo-Tocquevillian theory. Furthermore, empirical examination of their recruitment efficacy relative to state entities, particularly in crises or authoritarian settings, remains scarce. Our survey experiment in COVID-period China provides a twofold crucial case study. By embodying both the "most likely case" of effective state-led mobilization and the "least likely case" of potent civic organization efforts, it offers unique analytical leverage and insights. Civic appeals significantly boosted volunteer inclinations, whereas governmental outreach had minimal or even negative effects. This civic boost was stronger among those with less social and political trust and channeled by heightened political efficacy and active citizenship norms. Our findings shed light on the pivotal roles of civic organizations, even in authoritarian settings featuring embryonic civil societies.

The UN. has intensified efforts to recruit female peacekeepers for peacekeeping missions. From 2006 to 2014, the number of female military personnel in UN peacekeeping missions nearly tripled. The theory driving female recruitment is that female peacekeepers employ distinctive skills that make units more effective along a variety of dimensions. Yet skeptics argue that deeper studies are needed. This paper explores the theoretical mechanisms through which female military personnel are thought to increase the effectiveness of peacekeeping units. Using new data, we document variation in female participation across missions over time, and we explore the impact of female ratio balancing on various conflict outcomes, including the level of female representation in post-conflict political institutions, the prevalence of sexual violence in armed conflict, and the durability of peace. We find evidence that a greater proportion of female personnel is systematically associated with greater implementation of women's rights provisions and a greater willingness to report rape, and we find no evidence of negative consequences for the risk of conflict recurrence. We conclude that the inclusion of more female peacekeepers in UN peacekeeping does not reduce the ability to realize mission goals.