Research
Book Project
Surviving and Reviving: Religion and Politics in Authoritarian China
How has Protestant Christianity, which counted only one million followers on the eve of the Communist Revolution, grown into a major religion in China with 30–50 million adherents? I identify three factors: socialist state-building weakened the clan institutions that had dominated the religious field; disruptive market reforms generated a surge in religious demand; and Christian leaders strategically adopted pro-regime and nationalist framing to broaden their appeal. The book draws on fieldwork in over 50 churches, more than 3,000 archival documents, and original surveys and experiments.
Publications
Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao. 2022. “Why Democracies Survive.” Journal of Democracy 33(4): 133–149.
Under Review
Preaching for Power: Consequences of Pro-Regime Propaganda by Religious Leaders [PDF]
Job Market Paper · Best Student Paper Award, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2024
Abstract
What are the consequences of religious leaders promoting state propaganda in authoritarian regimes? This paper argues that propaganda promotion serves as a strategic outreach tool for leaders of religious minority groups to appeal to the broader public. When leaders of politically distrusted groups endorse pro-regime messaging, they signal conformity to the dominant social and political order. This reduces the perceived threat held by the non-religious majority, helping to legitimize the group’s position and enhance outreach. However, this strategic signaling risks alienating existing believers who perceive such messages as contradicting core religious principles. I test this argument using two survey experiments in China with Christians as a case study. The results show that non-religious respondents express greater trust in pastors who promote pro-regime messages and report higher openness to religious recruitment from them. Furthermore, these respondents demonstrate greater sympathy when such pastors face repressive measures from the regime. Among Christians, however, pro-regime messaging generates backlash, particularly from long-term converts and frequent attendees. These findings reveal a fundamental dilemma for minority religious leaders under authoritarianism: balancing the need to appeal to outsiders against the necessity of preserving credibility and connection with their own believers.Searching for the Gods: Internet Search as a Measure of Religious Practice in China [PDF]
Abstract
Scholars of Chinese religion face a persistent data problem. Official statistics are opaque; surveys suffer from preference falsification and coarse coverage; and both track religiosity through denominational identity and registered venues, missing the diffused practices that pervade Chinese life without affiliation. Using data from Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, I introduce an unobtrusive, national-scale measure of religiosity. Search volumes track each tradition’s liturgical calendar and align with demographic benchmarks for Christians and Muslims. For Buddhism, they diverge from identity- and venue-based estimates, revealing across North China a population of unaffiliated practitioners invisible to existing instruments. After mapping the field’s institutional and folk layers, I demonstrate its analytical potential with the COVID-19 pandemic: local outbreaks trigger surges in searches for prayer and the Great Compassion Mantra, an incantation recited beyond Buddhist congregations, while denomination-specific scriptures show no change. Even under state atheism, crisis turns citizens toward religion, through practices requiring no belonging.Reading the Room: Nationality-of-Sponsor Effects on Survey Responses in China (with Jay Kao) [PDF]
Abstract
Public opinion surveys are essential tools for studying authoritarian politics. Standard practice makes sponsorship salient through consent forms and institutional banners. Yet we know little about whether sponsor cues affect response patterns. We evaluate nationality-of-sponsor effects through a survey experiment with Chinese adults randomly assigned to varying sponsor nationality conditions. We find that U.S. sponsorship, compared to Chinese sponsorship, increased reported VPN usage and overseas connections, decreased pro-regime behaviors, reduced nationalist sentiment, and increased favorability toward the U.S. and its allies. These effects extended beyond politically sensitive items, appearing even in American music preferences, while leaving trust in domestic institutions unaffected, and they persist under the list experiment. Our findings underscore the necessity of accounting for sponsor nationality when interpreting survey data from authoritarian contexts.Leader Tenure and Leader Power (with John Gerring, Andres Cruz, Erzen Öncel, and Harunobu Saijo) [PDF]
Abstract
Despite its empirical ambiguity, the concept of leader power remains central to our understanding of politics. We argue that this recalcitrant concept may be successfully operationalized by time in office—a proxy that is directly observable across time and settings. First, we lay out a theoretical rationale. Second, we test the proposition empirically by associating tenure with existing measures. Subjective assessments of leader power are drawn from experts, LLM queries, and Google searches. Institutional limits on leader power are inferred from regime type, executive constraints, personalism, and forced departures. In certain settings, we are able to estimate the impact of an as-if random elongation of tenure. The tests corroborate the thesis: leader tenure is a generalizable metric of leader power.Working Papers
Revolutions and Revivals: How State-Building Sparks New Religious Movements [PDF]
Abstract
What explains the proliferation of new religious movements? I argue that state-building projects, though designed to consolidate control over society, often generate the structural conditions for the emergence of new religious movements. In their drive to atomize society and eliminate competing power centers, the state systematically dismantles intermediary institutions that controlled the spiritual domain, creating a grassroots vacuum that opens space for new religious groups to emerge. I apply this framework to the explosive growth of Christianity in China. Leveraging a novel dataset spanning the pre- and post-1949 eras, I document a striking “reversal of fortune.” Prior to the revolution, strong lineage clans, the most important social organizations in rural China, slowed down Christian expansion. However, as the CCP’s state-building campaigns dismantled clans, Christianity expanded most rapidly precisely in those areas where clans had historically been strongest. Challenging the view of state building as an engine of social homogenization, I demonstrate that it can act as a catalyst for religious pluralism by shattering the traditional institutions’ monopoly over the spiritual realm.The Gentry and the Sectarian: Elite Status Preservation in Post-Imperial China
Abstract
How do incumbent elites preserve their power and status after regime transition? Departing from a state-centered literature that focuses on how old elites retain control over state institutions and apparatuses, I argue that incumbent elites can also invest in social institutions to build a power base independent of the state. Such a strategy not only helps them preserve influence and prestige after losing formal political power, but also enables them to maintain control over local society, especially under conditions of state weakness. I apply this argument to explain the puzzling surge of sectarian movements following China’s 1911 Republican Revolution. I contend that the revolution constituted a profound shock to the power and social standing of traditional elites, the gentry class. In response, these elites redirected resources into sectarian movements as organizational vehicles through which they could recover some of the status and influence stripped from them by regime change. Using a novel county-level dataset on the distribution of sectarian groups, I show that regions with a higher historical density of traditional elites during the Qing dynasty exhibited significantly greater sectarian prevalence. Further analysis shows that the positive relationship between elite density and sectarian prevalence is weaker in places where alternative informal organizational vessels, such as lineage clans, offered substitute channels for absorbing displaced elite resources.Education and Selective Liberalism: Evidence from China (with Jay Kao)
Abstract
Most research on education and ideology focuses on democracies, where scholars have documented growing ideological disparities across educational levels. Whether these findings extend to nondemocracies—where the state controls educational content—remains underexplored. We address this gap by examining the causal effects of both secondary and tertiary education on political and social liberalism in China, exploiting two reforms that generated plausibly exogenous variation in schooling. Using instrumental variable strategies, we find consistent evidence that education promotes progressive social attitudes on gender equity and sexuality while leaving political orientations unchanged. We discuss several plausible mechanisms: curriculum content, strategic self-censorship, and performance-based legitimacy evaluations. These findings qualify the modernization thesis and highlight the asymmetric effects of authoritarian education on mass ideology.Work in Progress
Mediated Authority: Religious Institutionalization and Trust in Secular Institutions
Abstract
Trust in America’s core institutions has eroded for decades. Why do some citizens extend trust to impersonal institutions while others withhold it? This paper traces one source to the organizational structure of religious authority: denominations differ in whether authority is mediated through offices, credentials, and disciplinary procedures, or supplied directly by charismatic figures. Members of institutionalized traditions, I argue, extend a template of mediated, impersonal authority to secular life. To test this, I develop an original denomination-level Index of Institutionalization and apply it among white Protestants across multiple national surveys and county-level data spanning five decades. Members of more institutionalized denominations express greater confidence in courts, science, and medicine, greater vaccine acceptance, and less anti-establishment sentiment; at the county level, more institutionalized places give anti-establishment primary candidates lower vote shares and reach higher vaccination rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results survive demographic, ideological, and partisan controls and an instrument based on childhood religion. The century-long drift of American Protestantism away from these forms is thus an overlooked source of eroding institutional trust.Leader Tenure Through History (book manuscript, with John Gerring, Andres Cruz, Erzen Öncel, and Harunobu Saijo)
Abstract
Drawing on thousands of sources and employing innovative data collection approaches, including large-scale web scraping and AI-driven data extraction, we compiled a dataset of leaders across social, political, and business domains, covering over 190 countries and more than 2,000 years. Using these data, we document a long-run decline in leadership tenure and attribute this trend to organizational institutionalization, the expanding scale of coordination, and shifts toward more meritocratic recruitment.Mapping the Hidden Sacred: Religious Venues and the Local Policy Environment in China (with Fenggang Yang)