When COVID-19 first emerged in China, there was speculation that the outbreak would trigger public anger and weaken the Chinese regime. By analyzing millions of social media posts from Sina Weibo made between December 2019 and February 2020, we describe the content and sentiment of public,...

Do informal institutions, rules and norms created and enforced by social groups, promote good local governance in environments of weak democratic or bureaucratic institutions? This question is difficult to answer because of challenges in defining and measuring informal institutions and...

This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the...

This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the...

This paper takes a novel perspective on the selection of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by focusing on career tracks of high-level CCP officials. Career tracks are defined as clusters of similar career trajectories with respect to both vertical and horizontal movements. We measure...

This paper examines the role of social capital in disaster relief during China's Great Famine of 1958-1961. We use the number of genealogies—books recording family trees—as a proxy for family clans, one of the most important vehicles of social capital in rural China. Using a county-year...

The study of ideology in authoritarian regimes --- of how public preferences are configured and constrained --- has received relatively little scholarly attention. Using data from a large-scale online survey, we study ideology in China. We find that public preferences are weakly constrained, and...