Unpolluted Decisions: Air Quality and Judicial Outcomes in China. 2020. With Peichun Wang. Economics Letters, vol. 194, September 2020. [pdf] [publisher's version][replication data]
Judicial outcomes should not be influenced by factors that have no bearing on legal decisions, but studies have shown that judges can be affected by extraneous variables such as weather, sports events, and food consumption. Employing the universe of drug offense court decisions in five major Chinese cities between 2014 and 2015, we study whether air pollution and temperature affect sentencing outcomes in China, where air pollution is severe and judges have considerable discretion in sentencing drug cases. We find that Chinese criminal judges are not at all affected by pollution or temperature changes. One standard deviation change in air pollutant PM2.5 level may change the sentence length by no more than 2% of its standard deviation with over 95% probability. Further analysis shows that our results are robust to a variety of specifications and a battery of robustness checks. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings are not always swayed by extraneous factors, and we discuss conditions under which public officials are more likely to be shielded from these non-legal factors.
Anti-Muslim Bias in the Chinese Labor Market. 2020. With Chuyu Liu and Charles Crabtree. Journal of Comparative Economics, 48(2): 235-250.
(Lead Article) [pdf][publisher's version]
Is there a Muslim disadvantage in economic integration to the Chinese economy? Do political mandates from the government help reduce disparities? To answer these questions, we conducted a large-scale audit study and submitted over 4,000 fictitious resumes to job advertisements for accounting and administrative positions posted by private firms, state-owned firms, and foreign firms. We randomized the ethnic identities of job applicants, their academic merits, and requested salaries. Our results show that a Muslim job seeker is at least 50 percent less likely to receive a callback than a Han job seeker, and higher academic merit does not compensate for this bias. Importantly, we find that state-owned enterprises are equally likely to discriminate against Muslim job seekers, despite their political mandate to increase diversity. Interview evidence suggests that besides outright hostility towards outgroups, there exist operational costs to diversity related to building infrastructure that accommodates religious and cultural needs.
Violence Exposure and Support for State Use of Force in a Non-Democracy. 2019. With Kai Quek. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 6(2): 120–130. [pdf][dataverse][publisher's version]
How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on episodes of violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.
Constituency Service Under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China. 2017. With Greg Distelhorst. Journal of Politics. 79(3): 1024–1040. [publisher's version] [dataverse] [pdf]
Why do nondemocratic regimes provide constituency service? This study develops theory based on a national field audit of China's "Mayor's Mailbox," an institution that allows citizens to contact local political officials. Analyzing government responses to over twelve hundred realistic appeals from putative citizens, we find local service institutions in China are comparably responsive to similar institutions in democracies. Two key predictors of institutional quality are economic modernization and the intensity of local social conflict. We explain these findings by proposing a demand-driven theory of nondemocratic constituency service; in order to sustain the informational benefits of citizen participation, service institutions must increase responsiveness according to citizen demand. We then offer supplementary evidence for this theory by analyzing the content of real letters from citizens to local officials in China.
Ingroup Bias in Official Behavior: A National Field Experiment in China. 2014. With Greg Distelhorst. Quarterly Journal of Political Science. 9(2): 203–230. [publisher's version] [pdf] [replication data]
Do ingroup biases distort the behavior of public officials? Recent studies detect large ethnic biases in elite political behavior, but their case selection leaves open the possibility that bias obtains under relatively narrow historical and institutional conditions. We clarify these scope conditions by studying ingroup bias in the radically different political, historical, and ethnic environment of contemporary China. In a national field experiment, local officials were 33% less likely to provide assistance to citizens with ethnic Muslim names than to ethnically-unmarked peers. We find evidence consistent with the ingroup bias interpretation of this finding and detect little role for strategic incentives mediating this effect. This result demonstrates that neither legacies of institutionalized racism nor electoral politics are necessary to produce large ingroup biases in official behavior. It also suggests that ethnically motivated distortions to governance are more prevalent than previously documented.
Achieving Efficiency without Losing Accuracy: Strategies for Scale Reduction. 2018. With Krista Loose and Adam Berinsky. Social Science Quarterly. 99(2):563-582. [publisher's version][pdf]
Researchers often employ lengthy survey instruments to tap underlying phenomena of interest. However, concerns about the cost of fielding longer surveys and respondent fatigue can lead scholars to look for abbreviated, yet accurate, variations of longer, validated scales. In this paper we provide a template for scale reduction, and apply the template to two existing scales—the Risk Attitudes and Racial Resentment scales. The template walks researchers through a procedure for using existing data to consider all possible subscales along several reliability and validity criteria. After applying the template, we propose a four-item Risk Attitudes scale that maintains nearly identical reliability and validity as the full scale and a three-item Racial Resentment subscale that outperforms the two-item subscale currently used in a major congressional survey. Our general template should be of use to a broad range of scholars seeking to achieve efficiency without losing accuracy when reducing lengthy scales.
OTHER WRITINGS
Book Review of Ling Chen, "Manipulating Globalization" Perspectives on Politics, Vol 18, Issue 2, 2020
Book Review of Nicholas Lardy, "The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?" Journal of Chinese Political Science, 2020
The Private Sector: Challenges and Opportunities During Xi's Second Term. China Leadership Monitor, Issue 59, Spring 2019
Bringing Together the Studies of Ethnic Prejudice and Conflict in Chinese Politics. Comparative Politics Newsletter, Fall 2017
Making Chinese Officials Accountable, Blog by Blog, with Greg Distelhorst and Diana Fu, Boston Review, September 27, 2016
(in Chinese)
Gender discrimination in an elite Chinese university (身为一流学府，浙江大学应该沉默吗). Tencent ipress.(腾讯大家). December 29, 2017
Ten Questions on Boston Bombings (with a Q&A with Rich Nielsen), with Xiaohan Shi, The Southern Weekly, April 18, 2013
Are Government Officials Becoming Younger? With Qian Haoping and Wang Xian, The Southern Weekly, February 4, 2012
How Does "Cadre Working Group" Investigate Local Cadres? With Qian Haoping, The Southern Weekly, December 27, 2011
Judicial outcomes should not be influenced by factors that have no bearing on legal decisions, but studies have shown that judges can be affected by extraneous variables such as weather, sports events, and food consumption. Employing the universe of drug offense court decisions in five major Chinese cities between 2014 and 2015, we study whether air pollution and temperature affect sentencing outcomes in China, where air pollution is severe and judges have considerable discretion in sentencing drug cases. We find that Chinese criminal judges are not at all affected by pollution or temperature changes. One standard deviation change in air pollutant PM2.5 level may change the sentence length by no more than 2% of its standard deviation with over 95% probability. Further analysis shows that our results are robust to a variety of specifications and a battery of robustness checks. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings are not always swayed by extraneous factors, and we discuss conditions under which public officials are more likely to be shielded from these non-legal factors.
Anti-Muslim Bias in the Chinese Labor Market. 2020. With Chuyu Liu and Charles Crabtree. Journal of Comparative Economics, 48(2): 235-250.
(Lead Article) [pdf][publisher's version]
Is there a Muslim disadvantage in economic integration to the Chinese economy? Do political mandates from the government help reduce disparities? To answer these questions, we conducted a large-scale audit study and submitted over 4,000 fictitious resumes to job advertisements for accounting and administrative positions posted by private firms, state-owned firms, and foreign firms. We randomized the ethnic identities of job applicants, their academic merits, and requested salaries. Our results show that a Muslim job seeker is at least 50 percent less likely to receive a callback than a Han job seeker, and higher academic merit does not compensate for this bias. Importantly, we find that state-owned enterprises are equally likely to discriminate against Muslim job seekers, despite their political mandate to increase diversity. Interview evidence suggests that besides outright hostility towards outgroups, there exist operational costs to diversity related to building infrastructure that accommodates religious and cultural needs.
- Media Coverage: The Economist; South China Morning Post inkstone
Violence Exposure and Support for State Use of Force in a Non-Democracy. 2019. With Kai Quek. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 6(2): 120–130. [pdf][dataverse][publisher's version]
How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on episodes of violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.
- Winner of the Best JEPS Article Award in 2019
Constituency Service Under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China. 2017. With Greg Distelhorst. Journal of Politics. 79(3): 1024–1040. [publisher's version] [dataverse] [pdf]
Why do nondemocratic regimes provide constituency service? This study develops theory based on a national field audit of China's "Mayor's Mailbox," an institution that allows citizens to contact local political officials. Analyzing government responses to over twelve hundred realistic appeals from putative citizens, we find local service institutions in China are comparably responsive to similar institutions in democracies. Two key predictors of institutional quality are economic modernization and the intensity of local social conflict. We explain these findings by proposing a demand-driven theory of nondemocratic constituency service; in order to sustain the informational benefits of citizen participation, service institutions must increase responsiveness according to citizen demand. We then offer supplementary evidence for this theory by analyzing the content of real letters from citizens to local officials in China.
- Media Coverage: The New York Times
Ingroup Bias in Official Behavior: A National Field Experiment in China. 2014. With Greg Distelhorst. Quarterly Journal of Political Science. 9(2): 203–230. [publisher's version] [pdf] [replication data]
Do ingroup biases distort the behavior of public officials? Recent studies detect large ethnic biases in elite political behavior, but their case selection leaves open the possibility that bias obtains under relatively narrow historical and institutional conditions. We clarify these scope conditions by studying ingroup bias in the radically different political, historical, and ethnic environment of contemporary China. In a national field experiment, local officials were 33% less likely to provide assistance to citizens with ethnic Muslim names than to ethnically-unmarked peers. We find evidence consistent with the ingroup bias interpretation of this finding and detect little role for strategic incentives mediating this effect. This result demonstrates that neither legacies of institutionalized racism nor electoral politics are necessary to produce large ingroup biases in official behavior. It also suggests that ethnically motivated distortions to governance are more prevalent than previously documented.
- Media Coverage: The Economist
Achieving Efficiency without Losing Accuracy: Strategies for Scale Reduction. 2018. With Krista Loose and Adam Berinsky. Social Science Quarterly. 99(2):563-582. [publisher's version][pdf]
Researchers often employ lengthy survey instruments to tap underlying phenomena of interest. However, concerns about the cost of fielding longer surveys and respondent fatigue can lead scholars to look for abbreviated, yet accurate, variations of longer, validated scales. In this paper we provide a template for scale reduction, and apply the template to two existing scales—the Risk Attitudes and Racial Resentment scales. The template walks researchers through a procedure for using existing data to consider all possible subscales along several reliability and validity criteria. After applying the template, we propose a four-item Risk Attitudes scale that maintains nearly identical reliability and validity as the full scale and a three-item Racial Resentment subscale that outperforms the two-item subscale currently used in a major congressional survey. Our general template should be of use to a broad range of scholars seeking to achieve efficiency without losing accuracy when reducing lengthy scales.
OTHER WRITINGS
Book Review of Ling Chen, "Manipulating Globalization" Perspectives on Politics, Vol 18, Issue 2, 2020
Book Review of Nicholas Lardy, "The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China?" Journal of Chinese Political Science, 2020
The Private Sector: Challenges and Opportunities During Xi's Second Term. China Leadership Monitor, Issue 59, Spring 2019
Bringing Together the Studies of Ethnic Prejudice and Conflict in Chinese Politics. Comparative Politics Newsletter, Fall 2017
Making Chinese Officials Accountable, Blog by Blog, with Greg Distelhorst and Diana Fu, Boston Review, September 27, 2016
(in Chinese)
Gender discrimination in an elite Chinese university (身为一流学府，浙江大学应该沉默吗). Tencent ipress.(腾讯大家). December 29, 2017
Ten Questions on Boston Bombings (with a Q&A with Rich Nielsen), with Xiaohan Shi, The Southern Weekly, April 18, 2013
Are Government Officials Becoming Younger? With Qian Haoping and Wang Xian, The Southern Weekly, February 4, 2012
How Does "Cadre Working Group" Investigate Local Cadres? With Qian Haoping, The Southern Weekly, December 27, 2011
