Why Democracies Survive. Journal of Democracy 33, no. 4 (2022): 133–149. (with Jason Brownlee)

Experts worry that de facto single-person regimes in previous multiparty states (Russia, Turkey, Venezuela) and norm-defiance in existing democracies (Brazil, Hungary, the United States) signal a coming authoritarian age. Without examining the broader record, however, it is hard to know whether such tremors presage a global convulsion. A century’s worth of evidence (1920–2019) shows that contemporary democracies are sturdier than they look. Above all, high levels of economic development continue to sustain multipartism; OECD democracies have faced less risk than often intimated. Further, competition among political parties, regardless of national affluence, contains a momentum that even the most willful demagogues have had trouble stopping. These economic and institutional bulwarks help explain why democratic backsliding, which seems so portentous, has preceded democratic survival more often than breakdown. Even as executive aggrandizement and rancorous partisanship roil the world’s most venerable democracies, they are unlikely to produce new autocracies absent permissive material conditions.

Preaching for Power: Consequences of Pro-Regime Propaganda by Religious Leaders (Under Review)

What are the consequences of religious leaders promoting state propaganda in authoritarian regimes? While conventional wisdom holds that political alignment undermines religious authority among believers, this paper argues that it can also serve as a strategic outreach tool. When leaders of politically distrusted groups endorse regime messaging, they signal loyalty and reduce perceived threats among majority non-believers, helping legitimize their position and expand influence. I test this argument through two survey experiments on Christians in China. Results show that non-religious respondents express greater trust in pastors who promote pro-regime messages, along with higher openness to religious recruitment and greater sympathy when these pastors face state surveillance. Among Christians, however, such messaging generates backlash, especially from long-term converts and frequent attendees. These findings reveal a core dilemma for minority religious leaders under authoritarianism: how to navigate political pressures while preserving their credibility and connection with believers.

Leader Tenure and Leader Power, with John Gerring, Andrés Cruz, Laura de Castro Quaglia, and Harunobu Saijo (Under Review)

Despite its empirical ambiguity, the concept of leader power remains central to our understanding of politics, differentiating those organizations where decisionmaking prerogatives are monopolized by an individual from those where it is widely diffused. In this study, we argue that this recalcitrant concept may be successfully operationalized by time in office. Leader tenure is a generalizable metric of leader power. In the first section of the paper, we lay out a theoretical rationale. In the second section, we test the proposition empirically by associating leader tenure with existing measures that are widely regarded as reflecting leader power. Subjective assessments of power are drawn from experts, LLM queries, and Google searches. Institutional limits on power are inferred from regime type, executive constraints, personalism, and forced departures from office. In a few settings, we are able to estimate the impact of an as-if random elongation of tenure on leader power.

State Building and Religious Revivals: Evidence from China (Working Paper)

What explains the rise of new religious movements? I argue that state-building projects launched by political elites inadvertently sow the seeds for religious revivals. In their efforts to centralize power, revolutionary regimes weaken intermediary institutions while transforming societies, creating a vacuum at the grassroots level that fosters the emergence of new religious movements. Applying this theoretical framework to China, I examine the rapid growth of Christianity—one of the most remarkable religious revivals in modern history—using original quantitative data and qualitative case studies. I find that clans, the traditional patrimonial organizations that once structured grassroots society, inhibited the spread of Christianity before the Communist revolution. However, as the CCP’s state-building efforts dismantled clans’ influence as local power brokers, Christianity expanded more rapidly in areas with strong pre-revolutionary clan presence.

Measuring Religiosity in China: A New Appraoch using Internet Data (Working Paper)

Religion is experiencing a notable resurgence in contemporary Chinese society, exerting growing influence across cultural and political domains. Yet, one of the central challenges in the study of religion in China remains the scarcity and unreliability of available data. This paper reviews several commonly used sources—such as official statistics and public opinion surveys—and highlights their key limitations, including limited temporal and geographic coverage, as well as biases introduced by social desirability and underreporting. To address these shortcomings, I propose an innovative approach that leverages internet search data to measure religious activity. Using this method, I construct a city-level dataset of religious engagement and compare it with existing sources, including census data, surveys, and the number of registered religious venues. The results demonstrate a high degree of congruence across measures. Finally, I showcase the utility of this dataset by examining the spike in religious interest during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Selective Liberalizing Effects of Education in Authoritarian China, with Jay Kao

Recent studies primarily explore the relationship between education and ideology in democracies, highlighting disparities in political views among individuals with differential educational levels. Yet it remains unclear if these findings apply to nondemocracies, where education is often government run. In addition, the impact of secondary education, commonly the highest level of attainment in developing countries, is less understood. We address these gaps by examining the effects of education in China, utilizing reforms that expanded access to secondary and tertiary education. Results show that both levels of education foster progressive social attitudes like gender equity and homosexuality but do not affect political liberalism. Our findings cast doubt on the conventional modernization view that education necessarily empowers citizens to challenge authoritarian rule.

Work in progress

Does Researcher Identity Affect Responses in Online Surveys? Experimental Evidence from China, with Jay Kao

Successors of the Sacred: Salvationist Religions in China

Using POI Data to Study Religion in China, with Fenggang Yang