Research

Publications

• Wang, Hsu Yumin and Yeung, Eddy S. F.. Forthcoming. “Mimicking Democracy: The Legitimizing Role of Redistributionist Propaganda in Autocracies.” The Journal of Politics.

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  Autocrats often disseminate propaganda to boast about their redistributive efforts. Why is such propaganda so prevalent in autocracies? We propose a novel explanation: redistributionist propaganda helps autocrats fortify a façade of democracy. Our argument is premised on nuanced understandings of democracy among the masses: many citizens do not hold a strict, procedural view of democracy; instead, they often understand democracy through the lens of social equity. Exploiting such nuanced understandings of democracy, autocrats can deploy redistributionist propaganda to manipulate public opinion on how “equity-promoting”—and therefore how “democracy-promoting”—the regime is. To evaluate our argument, we first demonstrate with extensive cross-national survey data that perceived social equity strongly predicts perceived democratic legitimacy among global citizens. We then probe the causal effect of redistributionist propaganda by using a preregistered survey experiment that exploits real-world propaganda material in China. Consistent with our argument, respondents exposed to redistributionist propaganda evaluated China’s democracy more positively.

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. 2024. “Appeasing Workers without Great Loss: Autocracy and Progressive Labor Legislation.” Comparative Politics, 56(2): 149–171. [DOI]

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  Under what conditions do dictators enact pro-worker legislation? Conventional wisdom suggests that heightened mass discontent motivates dictators to make policy concessions to defuse revolutionary threats. However, a more protective labor law may decrease elites’ economic benefits - and thus loyalty to the regime. I argue that limited judicial independence helps dictators control the distributional outcomes of the law and therefore better respond to the twin challenges magnified by labor reforms. To test this argument, I conduct a cross-national analysis of sixty-eight autocracies from 1970 to 2008. I then examine an illustrative case - China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law - to illuminate how a non-independent judiciary gives autocrats more leeway to balance the interests of elites and the masses. This article contributes to our understanding of authoritarian survival strategies amid distributive tensions.

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. 2024. “Centralization, Elite Capture, and Service Provision: Evidence from Taiwan.” Comparative Political Studies, 57(1): 32-68. [DOI]; [appendix]; [replication]

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  Much recent work has debated the effect of decentralization on service provision, its underlying mechanisms, and the tradeoff between responsiveness and elite capture. This study contributes to that debate by investigating a rare partial rollout of institutional change that reversed administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization in Taiwan. Utilizing a difference-in-differences design, I find that centralization decreases public goods provision and that such a negative effect is stronger and more robust on those public goods that involve greater local government activity. Additional evidence related to mechanisms suggests that the loss of proximity and accountability in service delivery after centralization can be critical. The effect heterogeneity results do not constitute strong evidence that centralization significantly improves service provision in areas with higher levels of local elite capture. These findings highlight the importance of decentralization's responsiveness advantages in improving local service provision and advance the policy debate on local institutional choice.

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. 2024. “Information, Equal Treatment, and Support for Regressive Taxation: Experimental Evidence from the United States.” Political Behavior, 46(3): 1609–1632. [DOI]; [appendix]; [replication]

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  Regressive taxation has increasingly played an important role in financing public programs, but current scholarship remains largely silent on the conditions under which people would support such financing strategies. This paper fills this gap by focusing on the United States, where sales taxes account for nearly one-third of state government revenue, and where sales tax ballot measures have received majority support. This paper utilizes an online survey experiment to examine two potential sources of public support for a sales tax increase: equal treatment beliefs (i.e., that all should pay the same tax rate) and a lack of public awareness of the distributive consequences of sales taxes. I find that exposure to information about sales taxes' distributive consequences significantly reduced respondents' support for a sales tax increase, but that equal treatment beliefs had no significant effect on such support. Additional analyses suggest that other-regarding motivations are a plausible mechanism underlying the effects of information provision. These findings shed light on how misperceptions of tax burdens shape support for regressive taxation and have broad implications for the role of fairness beliefs in the formation of tax policy preferences.

Book Reviews

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. 2022. Book Review of “Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness.” Political Science Quarterly 137(4): 815-817. [DOI]

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. 2024. Book Review of “Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China’s Rise” Political Science Quarterly. [DOI]

Working Papers

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. “Mass Political Effects of Partially Fulfilled (Re)distributive Programs: Experimental Evidence from China.”

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  It is widely believed that autocratic rulers can contain mass discontent and garner political support by introducing progressive redistributive programs. However, such received wisdom overlooks the reality that many of the programs are partially fulfilled and may not meet popular expectations. What is the effect of partially fulfilled redistribution (PFR, hereafter) on regime support? This paper answers this question by focusing on China's 2008 Labor Contract Law, whose policy promises are often compromised in the process of judicial enforcement. I argue that the effect of PFR can be decomposed into two components: backlash against unfulfilled expectations and gains over status quo. Using a pre-registered online survey experiment, I offer, to my knowledge, the first experimental test on the effect of PFR. The findings indicate that, for rulers, PFR does not significantly decrease regime support when compared to inaction on grievances. Further analysis suggests that PFR, if it continues to deliver benefits, may mitigate the backlash resulting from unmet expectations, leading to more mixed and ambivalent attitudes towards the regime among the public. This study contributes to our understanding of the intricate dynamics of authoritarian control and the mass political effects of redistribution.

• Wang, Hsu Yumin. “A Latent Variable Approach to Measuring Mass Threats in Nondemocracies.”

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  Students of comparative politics have long recognized mass threats as a key driver of regime change and a variety of political outcomes under dictatorship. Yet, the existing literature to date remains divided over how to measure this theoretical concept properly in empirical research. To measure mass threats, while some prior studies rely on measures related to economic grievances, others emphasize the aspect of organizational capacity of mass mobilization. Moreover, substantial data missingness remains a common problem of the existing measures of mass threats. In this paper, I propose a more comprehensive, latent measure of mass threats in non-democracies to bridge the divide. Utilizing a Bayesian dynamic latent variable approach, the model synthesizes information on manifest indicators from the two facets, generating time-series cross-sectional data of mass threats covering 122 authoritarian countries from 1960 to 2018. I conduct several checks to demonstrate the validity of the new measure and use it to replicate Svolik’s (2013) central results of the inverted U-shaped relationship between mass threats and military intervention.

• Gandhi, Jennifer, Dulce Manzano, and Wang, Hsu Yumin. “Institutions and Democratization in Right-Wing Dictatorships.”

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  How does the ideology and institutional organization of authoritarian regimes affect processes of democratization? Class-based analyses of democratic transitions focus on how the poor mobilize against the rich to press for democratization under right-wing authoritarian regimes (Boix 2003, Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). While these models do much to further our understanding of democratization, they neither empirically verify the uniqueness of their claims for right-wing regimes nor take into account the role of institutions in dictatorships. In this paper, dictatorial institutions are brought to the fore in explaining patterns of regime transitions. Our theory establishes that the effect of these institutions will be conditional on the ideology of the regime. Faced with a high revolutionary threat posed by the poor, right-wing dictatorships endowed with political institutions (political parties and legislature) that enable lower-income sectors to secure redistributive policies are less likely to democratize (and more likely to survive). These institutions serve to maintain redistributive transfers even when the revolutionary threat of the poor diminishes. We provide evidence of these claims using original data on the ideological orientation of all dictatorships during the 1960-2008 period.

• Jud, Stefano, Will Giles, and Wang, Hsu Yumin. “Courting Condemnation: Audience Costs and International Court Compliance using Survey Evidence from China.”

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  Are international courts effective in changing state behavior and fostering international cooperation? Conventional wisdom suggests that international courts can promote cooperation since governments suffer domestic audience costs from non-compliance. Despite the possibility of audience costs, there are still many governments refusing to comply with decisions of international courts. We argue that this is because unfavorable rulings can spark domestic backlash among citizens against international courts. As a result, non-compliance should increase domestic support, especially amongst highly-nationalistic individuals. We tested the argument using a conjoint survey experiment in China where we exposed respondents to a hypothetical case where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an unfavorable ruling against China. We find that citizens prefer that the Chinese government does not comply with the ruling and these preferences are significantly stronger among individuals with strong nationalist sentiment. The results of our experiment highlight that, contrary to previous literature, international courts may not always induce international cooperation.

Work in Progress

• Project Measuring and Testing Interventions to Change Resilience and Will-to-Fight in Taiwan (with Renard Sexton, Hans Tung, and Eddy Yeung)

• Null Results Report Attitudes toward Internal Migrants and Support for Redistribution: Evidence from Shanghai (with Eddy Yeung) [OSF Preprint]; [Pre-analysis Plan]

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  Three mechanisms by which anti-migrant attitudes affect redistribution support are known in the current literature: fiscal burden, welfare chauvinism, and labor market competition. Leveraging the unique context of Shanghai—where internal migrants are often unwelcomed by the locals and where the hukou system is particularly exclusionary in China—we explore how well these existing theories explain the relationship between anti-migrant attitudes and redistribution support among local Shanghainese. We designed a survey experiment that randomly exposed Shanghainese respondents to a prime about (1) fiscal pressure from rural migrants, (2) cultural differences between Shanghainese and rural migrants, or (3) labor market competition threat from rural migrants. Another randomized subset of respondents received a frame about the decreasingly exclusionary nature of Shanghai's hukou system. Respondents across all treatment groups reported statistically insignificant differences in their redistribution support, compared to the baseline attitudes in the pure control group.