Coordinating nominations: how to deal with an incumbent surplus after electoral reform

How do parties and candidates react to electoral system reform? While the literature on causes and consequences of electoral reforms is receiving increasing attention, we lack a systematic micro-level account on how parties and candidates adopt to changes in electoral rules and district boundaries. This paper examines the case of the Japanese Liberal Democrats to explore how the party has managed to accommodate a surplus of incumbents to a reduced number of nominal tier seats following the 1994 electoral reform. By using micro-level data, I examine how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has matched candidates based on their expected electoral strength and ideological positioning to new districts. Moreover, I investigate how the newly instituted party-list allowed the LDP to avoid its disintegration at the local level by systematically defusing local stand-offs through the handing out of promising list positions. My findings help to understand how the LDP could avoid its disintegration and could continue to dominate Japanese politics until today.

Risk society and the politics of food safety problems in China

In China, the public has gradually shifted their focus from GDP growth to quality-of-life issues, which imposes new challenges for the government. The food safety problem, as a salient issue, is one such example. This article analyzes how food safety problems affect ordinary Chinese people's trust in the government and their attribution of governmental responsibility using nationally representative survey data. As food safety risks are unequally distributed in China, the political impact of food safety problems varies among people of different socioeconomic statuses. The results show that food safety problems weaken the public's trust in both the central and local governments, but this negative effect is attenuated among people with a low level of education. Moreover, the Chinese public tends to attribute major responsibility to the central government rather than local governments when perceiving the severity of food safety problems, and this tendency becomes stronger for the low-income population. The results deepen the understanding of the local-central political trust patterns and the political implications of food safety problems in China.

Resisting autocratization: the protest–repression nexus in Hong Kong's Anti-ELAB Movement

This introductory essay outlines the core themes of the special issue on the rise and fall of Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. In the essay, we highlight several theoretical and empirical contributions the featured papers make to our understanding of the protest–repression nexus from the onset of the movement to the imposition of the National Security Law. First, we describe the political and social contexts of the movement. Second, we present our empirical findings on Hong Kongers' political preferences. Finally, we highlight new research avenues arising from this special issue.

Solidarity in diversity: online petitions and collective identity in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement

Collective identity is a key catalyst of protest mobilization. How does collective identity come into existence among strangers with diverse backgrounds, especially in movements without a centralized leadership? Although collective identity is often seen as something constructed by movement organizations or out of established networks, we describe a more bottom-up and decentralized process in which movement collective identity is created through the horizontal mobilization of intermediate identities, which leverage pre-existing social identifications to induce commitment among individuals. Focusing on Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement of 2019, we argue that online petitions against the controversial bill created intermediate group identities among myriad social groups, such as alumni, professions, hobby groups, and residential communities. These intermediate identities provided rich discursive resources for previously disconnected individuals to collectively perceive the threat of the bill and see the obligation to act, which, in turn, shaped a strong collective identity early on in the protests. Our findings may help contribute to a more nuanced understanding of collective identity formation in contemporary leaderless movements.

Anti-ELAB Movement, National Security Law, and heterogeneous institutional trust in Hong Kong

How does repression on opposition protests affect citizens' institutional trust under dictatorships? There has been a burgeoning literature investigating empirically both long- and short-term impacts of protests and their repression on citizens' political preferences in both democratic and nondemocratic contexts. Yet, the literature tells us relatively little about how the above question could be answered. This paper tries to answer this question by taking advantage of a recent natural experiment in Hong Kong when Beijing suddenly adopted the National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020 to repress dissidents' protest mobilization. Our findings are twofold. First of all, the NSL drove a wedge in the Hong Kong society by making the pro-establishment camp more satisfied with the post-NSL institutions on the one hand, while alienating the pro-democracy camp who lost tremendous trust in them on the other. Second, our study also reveals that one's trust in institutions is significantly associated with the regimes' ability to curb protesters' contentious mobilization. The Hong Kongers who had higher confidence in the NSL to rein in protests would also have a greater level of trust than those who didn't. The effect, however, is substantially smaller among pro-democracy Hong Kongers except for their trust in monitoring institutions. As Beijing is transforming Hong Kong's current institutions from within hopes of bringing about a new political equilibrium, our study helps provide a timely assessment of Hong Kong's institutional landscape and sheds light on how likely this strategy can work.

Poverty alleviation and state building in peripheral areas: evidence from China

The literature suggests that the distributive allocations of local public goods help politicians secure support and thus contribute to political survival. We argue that the selective assignment of state-led infrastructure projects can bolster political control in peripheral areas by inducing the government's investment in essential administrative and security apparatus for project implementation and long-term state building. Drawing on a unique county-level dataset, we study the effects of poverty alleviation transfers in Xinjiang. We find that poverty alleviation was associated with significant increases in government spending on public management and security. In contrast, these alleviation transfers had a small and ambiguous effect on increasing agricultural production and reducing ethnic violence in the province. Our findings highlight the importance of comparing the capacity and welfare implications of distributive politics, as fiscal subsidies may change the actions of the leader's local agents more than altering the behaviors and attitudes of those who may benefit from these transfers.

Global sources of credibility: production integration, international institutions, and private property rights in authoritarian regimes

An important field of the political economy literature examines the mechanism of property rights commitments in authoritarian regimes where formal political constraints are absent. While many of the existing studies focus on how domestic autocratic institutions shape the formation of property rights regimes, this paper takes an open-economy approach and examines the compound effect of global economic integration and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) on property rights protection in authoritarian regimes. We propose that the domestic presence of foreign factors of production is positively associated with more credible property rights commitments in authoritarian economies. Moreover, this association is moderated by authoritarian regimes' participation in institutionalized IGOs, which enhance the organizational capacity of these foreign owners of production factors. Through the transnational networks of production integration, international institutions indirectly alter the domestic distribution of bargaining power between the authoritarian government and private economic actors, rendering the commitment to property rights protection more credible. An analysis of a panel dataset consisting of 105 authoritarian regimes yields preliminary evidence supporting our proposition.

Reducing political polarization in Hong Kong: a pilot experiment of deliberation

Contemporary Hong Kong is riven by serious political and social polarization. Hong Kong's problem does not lie in ideological differences among citizens; rather, the major issue is that people of different political stripes view each other as enemies. In this study, we conducted two experiments to compare the impacts of deliberation and discussion on political depolarization. In study 1, we invited participants of opposing views toward the Article 23 legislation and conducted a 90-min discussion session. The participants were divided into two groups: deliberation and causal discussion. The deliberation group received an information booklet on the issue and had to strictly follow rules of deliberation whereas the causal discussion group had no such stimuli. In study 2, we used video recordings from study 1 and presented the videos to two groups of participants. One group of participants watched the deliberation video and the other group watched the causal discussion video. The main finding of the study is both deliberation and causal discussion had mixed effects on reducing political polarization. After discussion, issue attitude and issue polarization remained largely the same, but people's attitude toward others with opposing views became more favorable and affective polarization was reduced. No systematic differences were found between deliberation and discussion. And watching discussion and deliberation will deliver similar effects but to a lesser extent.