Dissertation & Book Project:
Whose Voice Matters? Conformists, Non-conformists, and Authoritarian Responsiveness in China
Despite lacking electoral incentives, officials in non-democracies provide numerous deliberation channels that respond to citizen grievances. What motivates government responsiveness under dictatorship? Are the regime's responses substantively helpful to resolve citizens' problems or are they simply symbolic responses? Do all citizen petitions get equal consideration? Previous research on authoritarian responsiveness largely contends that autocrats prioritize the appeals of potential dissidents. Yet, my findings, based on yearlong fieldwork and large-scale social media data, show that autocrats deliberately provide helpful, substantive services to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime. I argue that rewarding conformists is a calculated signal the regime sends to the public that political obedience is rewarded with real benefits.
My findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize accountability under autocracy not only as a reactive approach to appease opposition, but also as a proactive strategy to cultivate conformity. More broadly, since selective responsiveness is documented in both democracies and non-democracies, my findings call for more research and international auditing not only on whether governments respond to their citizens, but also on how they respond.
I document that the Chinese regime strategically maneuvers responses of different quality for social control. Using original data that consists of over 156,000 citizen appeals and official responses from the government-run petition accounts on Weibo (Chinese equivalent of Twitter), I show that local officials selectively provide substantive responses——responses that resolve the appealed problems——to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime's surveillance and censorship policies on the Internet. In contrast, officials selectively provide symbolic responses—--responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems——to potential organized opposition. Using interviews with local officials, on-site observation of how they interact with petitioners, and internal and published government documents, I find that officials engage in this selective responsiveness primarily to inform petitioners and potential petitioners that compliance, not organized opposition, will open doors for satisfying their demands.
Further, to answer the critical question of how these state-run deliberative institutions influence regime stability, I follow how government responses of different quality shape citizen expression and political participation over time. My theory implies that over time, the regime’s selective responsiveness should elicit more conformist behaviors among citizens. To test this idea, I constructed a second, original dataset of 1,500 petitioners' online speech over three months before and three months after they submit an appeal to state-run petition accounts on Weibo. My longitudinal data suggest that obtaining a substantive response motivates citizens to speak more positively of the regime and increase engagement with government institutions.
Receiving a symbolic response motivates citizens to express more positive sentiment towards the regime on Weibo and over three months after the time of the response, these petitioners reduce their politically dissenting expressions to a level lower than that before the appeal despite that their problems are not resolved by the government. This suggests that the regime's selective responsiveness does induce citizens to express higher conformity in public. That said, the failure to obtain substantive response also motivates citizens to reduce appeals through government-run channels and instead, seek more coordination with other societal actors (e.g., private entrepreneurs, foreign media, citizen opinion leaders on Weibo) for petitions, which has the potential to destabilize the regime over time.
Whose Voice Matters? Conformists, Non-conformists, and Authoritarian Responsiveness in China
Despite lacking electoral incentives, officials in non-democracies provide numerous deliberation channels that respond to citizen grievances. What motivates government responsiveness under dictatorship? Are the regime's responses substantively helpful to resolve citizens' problems or are they simply symbolic responses? Do all citizen petitions get equal consideration? Previous research on authoritarian responsiveness largely contends that autocrats prioritize the appeals of potential dissidents. Yet, my findings, based on yearlong fieldwork and large-scale social media data, show that autocrats deliberately provide helpful, substantive services to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime. I argue that rewarding conformists is a calculated signal the regime sends to the public that political obedience is rewarded with real benefits.
My findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize accountability under autocracy not only as a reactive approach to appease opposition, but also as a proactive strategy to cultivate conformity. More broadly, since selective responsiveness is documented in both democracies and non-democracies, my findings call for more research and international auditing not only on whether governments respond to their citizens, but also on how they respond.
I document that the Chinese regime strategically maneuvers responses of different quality for social control. Using original data that consists of over 156,000 citizen appeals and official responses from the government-run petition accounts on Weibo (Chinese equivalent of Twitter), I show that local officials selectively provide substantive responses——responses that resolve the appealed problems——to citizens who demonstrate higher conformity to the regime's surveillance and censorship policies on the Internet. In contrast, officials selectively provide symbolic responses—--responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems——to potential organized opposition. Using interviews with local officials, on-site observation of how they interact with petitioners, and internal and published government documents, I find that officials engage in this selective responsiveness primarily to inform petitioners and potential petitioners that compliance, not organized opposition, will open doors for satisfying their demands.
Further, to answer the critical question of how these state-run deliberative institutions influence regime stability, I follow how government responses of different quality shape citizen expression and political participation over time. My theory implies that over time, the regime’s selective responsiveness should elicit more conformist behaviors among citizens. To test this idea, I constructed a second, original dataset of 1,500 petitioners' online speech over three months before and three months after they submit an appeal to state-run petition accounts on Weibo. My longitudinal data suggest that obtaining a substantive response motivates citizens to speak more positively of the regime and increase engagement with government institutions.
Receiving a symbolic response motivates citizens to express more positive sentiment towards the regime on Weibo and over three months after the time of the response, these petitioners reduce their politically dissenting expressions to a level lower than that before the appeal despite that their problems are not resolved by the government. This suggests that the regime's selective responsiveness does induce citizens to express higher conformity in public. That said, the failure to obtain substantive response also motivates citizens to reduce appeals through government-run channels and instead, seek more coordination with other societal actors (e.g., private entrepreneurs, foreign media, citizen opinion leaders on Weibo) for petitions, which has the potential to destabilize the regime over time.