RESEARCH

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Governmental Responses to Terrorism in Autocracies: Evidence from China
(with Philip Potter)
British Journal of Political Science 52, no. 1 (2022): 358-380. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123420000514.
Autocracies are widely assumed to have a counterterrorism advantage because they can censor media and are insulated from public opinion, thereby depriving terrorists of both their audience and political leverage. However, institutionalized autocracies such as China draw legitimacy from public approval and feature partially free media environments, meaning that their information strategies must be much more sophisticated than simple censorship. To better understand the strategic considerations that govern decisions about transparency in this context, we explore the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) treatment of domestic terrorist incidents in the official party mouthpiece—the People’s Daily. Drawing on original, comprehensive datasets of all known Uyghur terrorist violence in China and the official coverage of that violence, we demonstrate that the CCP promptly acknowledges terrorist violence only when both domestic and international conditions are favorable. We attribute this pattern to the entrenched prioritization of short-term social stability over longer-term legitimacy.

Domestic Polarization and Great Power Competition: How Adversaries Respond to America’s Partisan Politics
(with Rachel Myrick)
Journal of Politics, Accepted
How do foreign rivals perceive and respond to heightened domestic polarization in the United States? The conventional thinking is that polarization weakens and distracts the U.S., embolden- ing its adversaries. However, untested assumptions underlie this claim. We use two strategies to explore mechanisms linking domestic polarization and international rivalry. First, we field a sur- vey experiment in China to examine how heightening perceptions of U.S. polarization affects pub- lic attitudes towards Chinese foreign policy. Second, we investigate how U.S. rival governments responded to an episode of extreme partisanship: the U.S. Capitol attacks on January 6, 2021. Drawing on ICEWS event data, we explore whether foreign rivals increased hostility towards the U.S. following the Capitol riots. Both studies fail to show robust evidence for the emboldening hypothesis. Extreme polarization has other negative consequences for American foreign policy, but we find no evidence that it makes adversaries materially more assertive towards the United States.

Working Paper/Work in Progress

Move First to Avoid the Worst: Leadership Turnover and the Targeting of New Leaders
(Under Review, R & R)

Are leaders more likely to face militarized challenges earlier in their tenure? Existing studies posit contradictory hypotheses: new leaders can both invite challengers to take advantage of their inexperience, and deter challengers by their strong incentive to establish a reputation for resolve. This paper seeks to reconcile these competing tendencies by developing a conditional theory that centers on the anticipated direction of the foreign policy preference change associated with leadership turnover. I argue that foreign adversaries are likely to challenge a new leader in their rival state only when the newcomer is perceived to be more hawkish than the predecessor. Fear of suffering an even greater loss should they not act soon gives foreign adversaries incentive to confront the new hawk early on so that they can demonstrate their own position or to lock in a better outcome available today. Otherwise, when the newcomer is perceived to be more dovish than the predecessor, optimistic expectations of future interactions tend to restrain foreign adversaries from provoking the new dove whose reputation concern is high. Statistical analysis of a sample of rival dyads with democratically elected leaders on the target side during the post-WWII period yields strong evidence that supports this conditional hypothesis.

Distributions of leader type and the targeting pattern.

Predicted probability of being targeted over target's tenure.

The Strategic Logic of China’s Counter-Terrorism Foreign Policy
(with Philip Potter)
(Under Review, R & R)

China’s Counter-Terrorism Law of 2015 made it legal, for the first time, for Chinese security forces to engage in foreign counter-terrorism operations. This new outward-looking policy, however, only formalized the longstanding militarization and internationalization of China’s foreign policy through counter-terrorism cooperation. Since the first exercise with Kyrgyzstan in 2002, counter-terrorism joint military exercises with foreign militaries (CT-JMEs) have become a pillar of China’s regional relationships and the most visible manifestation of the internationalization of the PLA. However, despite this significance, relatively little is known about these activities. Drawing on an original and comprehensive dataset of PLA’s CT-JMEs in the period of 2002-2016, we identify the strategic calculations that drive these activities. Empirical results indicate that China has consistently prioritized CT-JME partners where terrorist threats are high, but only in places where China also has significant economic interests. We also find that this dynamic is more driven by domestic terrorist threat than by transnational terrorism. We argue that this pattern reflects a series of competing priorities in China’s regional foreign policy, which are (1) developing a credible reputation as a regional hegemon, (2) furthering military readiness and modernization, (3) safeguarding Chinese nationals and investments abroad, and (4) minimizing “blowback” from internationally-oriented terrorist organizations. While the first two of these priorities would bias toward militarized and expansive regional counterterrorism policies, the third and fourth concerns condition the impulse to engage.

China has consistently prioritized CT-JME partners where terrorist threats are high, but only in places where China also has significant economic interests.

Marginal effect of the host country's vulnerability to terrorism on the number CT-JME days with China, conditional on China's FDI level in that country

The U.S. Allies Under Fire: Terrorist Target Selection among Democracies
(with Ruixing Cao)
Working Paper

The majority of research on why democracies tend to be more vulnerable to transnational terrorism is focused exclusively on domestic institutional factors. Although institutional constraints and democratic accountability make the perpetration of attacks and message delivery cheaper and easier, not all democratic states are able to effectively meet terrorists' end goals by changing their policies. In other words, an ideal target should provide perpetrators with both ideal theaters where their actions could be carried out and ideal audience who can afford their causes. This paper argues that close democratic allies of the U.S. constitute such an ideal type of target, for they tend to be perceived as relatively easier targets than authoritarian states, being more able to effectively influence the course of terrorists' struggle than other peripheral democracies, and being less resolute in the global war on terror than the U.S. itself. To test this argument, this paper develops a novel measure of a country's coreness in the U.S.-centric network that takes into consideration of military deployment, UN voting, and economic interdependence. Using this measure, empirical analyses demonstrate that the widely proved positive relationship between being a democracy and the probability of being targeted by transnational terrorists is largely conditional on a country's affinity to the U.S. as peripheral democracies do not experience significantly more attacks than do autocracies. These findings confirm that violence is only the tool not the end; terrorists attack those who are able to meet their needs

Terrorists cares not only the theater of their action (regime type) but also the audience (closeness to the US).

The marginal effect of Polity Score on a state's vulnerability to transnational terrorism decreases as one's ideological distance from the US increases.

Wait for the Right Time: Leader's Tenure and International Cooperation
Work in Progress

What types of leaders are better positioned to promote international cooperation? On one hand, “only Nixon could go to China” is often used as a shorthand label to describe the domestic advantage enjoyed by hawkish leaders in pursuing reconciliation with foreign enemies. On the other hand, scholars have argued that incentive to avoid tougher opponent in the future tends to cause foreign adversaries to be more willing to reciprocate cooperation from a dovish leader in the rival state. This paper demonstrates that these two seemingly contradictory propositions are both correct, but are insufficient as they stand. Particularly lacking is a dynamic perspective that takes into consideration leaders’ changing ability to clear domestic barriers for cooperating with foreign adversaries across their tenure. Specifically, this paper argues that foreign adversaries should have a clear preference to work with dovish leaders in their rival states, but are also aware of the domestic disadvantage facing doves in reciprocating cooperation. As a result, foreign adversaries are only willing to initiate substantive cooperation when a dovish leader has accumulated enough experience and political capital at home. This pattern is most likely to arise when the new dovish leader in the rival state replaces a hawkish predecessor. Under this scenario, the bilateral relationship between two states is likely to be still locked-in tension and hostility, which gives foreign adversaries more incentive to wait for the right time to seek cooperation. Observational studies that drawn on event data shows that foreign adversaries tend to initiate more cooperation attempts toward leaders who are more Left-leaning than their predecessor, but only as the recipient leaders' time in office increases. A survey experiment demonstrates that US public's approval of the US president's cooperation with foreign adversaries is highly conditional on their perception of the president's competence to make right decisions.

Predicted number of cooperation attempts from foreign adversaries

Difference in the number of cooperation attempts between different types of recipient leaders

A Survey Experiment on Discriminate Targeting Strategy in Diplomatic Communication
Work in Progress

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an increasingly escalatory “war of words” between China and the US. A clear targeting pattern has emerged on both sides. US officials have consistently targeted “the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)” instead of “China” in their public statements and condemnations. In response, the Chinese side also moved away from “the US” to “Republican politicians” and then to specific persons like “Pompeo” and “Navarro” in their official statements. The rationale behind the discriminate targeting strategy is straightforward: delegitimize the ruler without alienating the ruled (or at least part of the ruled). However, despite the intuition, relatively little is known about the real effect of discriminate targeting on the public opinion of the target state. Not only might the effect of the discriminate targeting be too weak to make any substantive difference, but also the strategy could backfire, fueling animosity and promoting unity in the target state if the strategy is perceived as a deliberate attempt to sow dissension. Preliminary results from a survey experiment that uses a 2020 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) module indicate that this strategy is partially working. Respondents who voted for Clinton in 2016 tend to view China as significantly less threatening when the Chinese official condemnation targets Republican politicians as opposed to the United States as a nation.

Today Ukraine Tomorrow Taiwan? A Survey Experiment on Chinese Perceptions of U.S. Reputation for Resolve
(With Rachel Myrick)
Work in Progress

Is a state’s reputation “transferable” from one international crisis to another? We argue that for a state’s reputation to be transferable, three criteria must be fulfilled. First, a state’s actions in a current crisis must lead a third-party observer to update their assessment of that state’s general reputation for resolve. Second, the observer state must see the current crisis as highly comparable to a future potential crisis. Third, the observer state must amend its policy preferences in anticipation of the other state’s actions. In a framing experiment fielded in China in Spring 2022, we manipulate whether the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is framed as a “weak” or “strong” response. We find that framing U.S. response to Russian aggression as “strong” improves the U.S. government’s general reputation for resolve. However, it only has small impact on how the Chinese public anticipates the U.S. would respond in a future crisis with Taiwan, and it has no impact on public opinion about China’s policy towards Taiwan. Drawing on open-ended survey responses, we argue that this is because respondents view Russia’s war on Ukraine as fundamentally different than a future hypothetical crisis between China and Taiwan. Our experimental findings shed light on theoretical assumptions about the transferability of a state’s reputation based on their crisis behavior.

Outsourcing VS In-House: Professionalization, Accountability, and Trust in AI
Work in Progress

While all decisions have consequences, those consequences are particularly stark in the context of national security, where bad decisions could result in loss of life, discipline, or the end of a career. In light of uncertainty and these possible negative consequences, decision-makers’ confidence in a certain piece of information is partly derived from the chain of command organizational structure, which establishes accountability between different levels of the decision-making hierarchy. Computers, however, do not share the same career incentives, nor can they be punished. This develops an survey experiment to test if and how different institutional arrangements, such as creating an in-house algorithm department within the organization versus outsourcing algorithm designs to private sectors, might mitigate or amplify the accountability problem, and, by extension, decision-makers’ trust in AI. While popular writing on the accountability issue in AI tends to focus on the ethical or legal dimension, this study explores how the ambiguity around accountability might affect decision-makers’ willingness to adopt AI in the first place.