Pierre F. Landry

Undermining Authoritarian Innovation: The Power of China’s Industrial Giants

Recent scholarship suggests that authoritarian leaders may use seemingly democratic institutions to strengthen their own rule. In this vein, China’s leaders attempted to rein in local governments by introducing new transparency regulations, with environmental transparency a key focus. However, implementing these requirements necessitates cooperation from the very actors who may be weakened by them. Surprisingly, more industrial or more polluted cities were no slower in implementing environmental transparency than cleaner ones, with pollution measured using satellite data in order to avoid relying on questionable official sources. However, cities dominated by large industrial firms lagged in implementing environmental transparency, and this effect appears strongest when a city’s largest firm is in a highly polluting industry. Our findings demonstrate that even institutional innovations designed to preserve authoritarian rule can face significant challenges of implementation.

Elections in Rural China: Competition Without Parties

Village elections in China present scholars with the case of a single-party regime that allows voters to reject candidates regularly. Using a micro survey of 698 voters in 30 rural election districts, the authors demonstrate that when some candidates can lose, voters participate. A comparison of models of voter turnout and running for office further demonstrates that even when competition is structured to the benefit of party members, the perception of competition as choice between candidates is sufficient to engage voters and increase their perception that the electoral process is fair. These findings hold regardless of a respondent’s age, gender, membership in the Communist Party and Youth League, and general knowledge level and access to media. Village wealth and geographical isolation also do not demonstrate a strong substantive impact. One theoretical implication of these findings is that contested elections in authoritarian regimes may simultaneously strengthen demand for accountability and loyalty to the regime.

Urbanization and Mental Health in China: Linking the 2010 Population Census with a Cross-Sectional Survey

Along with the rapid urbanization in China, the state of mental health also receives growing attention. Empirical measures, however, have not been developed to assess the impact of urbanization on mental health and the dramatic spatial variations. Innovatively linking the 2010 Chinese Population Census with a 2011 national survey of urban residents, we first assess the impact of urbanization on depressive symptoms measured by the Center of Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) of 1288 survey respondents. We then retrieve county-level characteristics from the 2010 Chinese Population Census that match the individual characteristics in the survey, so as to create a profile of the “average person” for each of the 2869 counties or city districts, and predict a county-specific CES-D score. We use this county-specific CES-D score to compute the CES-D score for the urban population at the prefectural level, and to demonstrate the dramatic spatial variations in urbanization and mental health across China: highly populated cities along the eastern coast such as Shenyang and Shanghai show high CES-D scores, as do cities in western China with high population density and a high proportion of educated ethnic minorities.

Crisis Management in an Authoritarian Regime: Media Effects During the Sichuan Earthquake

Exogenous shocks are said to play a key role in the breakdown of authoritarian regimes. This paper sheds light on the conditions under which crisis management play out to the advantage of authoritarian leaders, or not. By chance, a national probability survey of the Chinese population was conducted before and after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Based on a quasi-experimental design that allows us to match pre- and post-quake respondents, we find that citizens were highly responsive to media content. In the short run, a more open information policy helped shore up support for a government that exhibited a high degree of responsiveness to the crisis. We find, however, that this approach may have undermined the regime’s legitimacy. Whereas in the immediate aftermath of the quake the Chinese media emphasized political unity and harmony, over time increasing and unusual criticisms of local governments in the media eroded public confidence. Even though support for political unity and harmony increased immediately after the quake, it quickly dropped below pre-quake levels. Our results are robust both to matching and to more standard parametric specifications.

Public Goods and Regime Support in Urban China

Why do authoritarian regimes try to improve the quality of their governance? In the absence of democratic institutions to monitor, reward and punish their performance, authoritarian politicians are normally expected to seek their self-interest through corruption and rewards to cronies, rather than providing for the public welfare. However, the Chinese state has actively promoted improved governance in recent years, with greater attention to quality of life issues to balance the primary focus on sustaining rapid economic growth. This paper analyses intra-national variation in the provision of public goods in urban China and the impact of public goods on regime support. Does better governance lead to higher levels of public support for the regime, even in the absence of democratic elections? Our evidence suggests that it does, with a greater impact for the local level than for the centre.

The Political Consequences of Economic Shocks

This paper evaluates long-term political consequences of severe economic shocks by combining a nationally-representative survey of Russians’ political behaviors with long-term subnational economic data tracing Russia’s post-Soviet economic transition. We show that the shock of transition has durably activated a limited but important sub-population of Russians while deactivating others. Surprisingly, much of the variation in contemporary political participation across Russia’s population can be explained by local economic conditions experienced by Russians in the early 1990s: Durable patterns of participation seem to have been “locked in” by economic trauma early in the transition period and are not influenced by the subsequent post-Soviet economic recovery or contemporary economic conditions.