Statement of Purpose
In my first year at XXX, I took a class on XXX politics. During the professor’s first three lectures,
he conveyed a single point: how critical, yet difficult, it is for Chinese political scientists to avoid
writing only what the state wants. I felt awakened. Having been raised in a small, isolated city
in China, I had only experienced pro-regime political socialization in school and at home and
had never been exposed to the political views of liberal intellectuals. The professor helped me
realize that the state’s control of society can be problematized both politically and analytically.
I decided to take more political science classes and gradually discovered my passion for using
the tools of empirical political science to understand politics in nondemocracies. As an MA
student at XXX, I enhanced my background in political science by focusing on comparative
politics and quantitative methods for my coursework, reading extensively in the field, working
with political science professors as a research assistant, and conducting independent research.
Having improved my mastery of the language of political science, I identified the core puz-
zle that had underpinned my motivation to study the subject and that will drive my future
research: How can we explain the state capacity and regime durability of autocracies? While
both autocracies and democracies project power into society by enforcing fiscal extraction and
policy, a robust autocracy imposes tight control over society and maintains the compliance of
its subjects for a sustained period. Why are some autocracies able to do so but not others? I am
especially intrigued by the regime–mass nexus. I am interested in how autocracies such as the
Chinese party-state can enjoy voluntary support from the masses while imposing tight political
control and why the masses in autocracies throughout the world often remain compliant when
they distrust their rulers. I aim to address autocratic state capacity and regime durability by
empirically examining autocratic political control and mass political behavior.
My research to date has focused on China to explore both the dynamics of autocratic repres-
sion and expropriation and the determinants of citizens’ political attitudes. For one project, I
used a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impact of state repression on protest mo-
bilization in China’s Tibet region. The results suggested that repression stifled mobilization in
the short term but intensified it in the long term. My MA thesis examined excessive fiscal ex-
traction, a covert form of expropriation in China; by applying firm–year two-way fixed effects
models to a large firm-level dataset, I demonstrated how local politicians’ career competition
may have led to excessive extraction. I am currently preparing to launch a survey experiment in
China to examine how exposure to violent prodemocracy protesters affects bystanders’ regime
support and protest propensity. For this project, I have designed a list experiment to com-
pensate for the likelihood of respondents falsifying their preferences due to China’s sensitive
political context and have validated my design in a recent pilot study.
These initial endeavors have helped me consider how to structure my future work on po-
litical control and behavior to extend current theoretical understandings of autocratic state ca-
pacity and regime stability. Theories of autocratic rule emphasize the role of elites—dictators,
their ruling coalitions, and their challengers—in state building and regime survival. Most of
these theories consider t he masses relevant only insofar as dictators are seen to react to mass
revolutionary threats through patronage and repression. In reality, dictators also actively boost
mass compliance and support, and they may do so without using repression or patronage: Re-
pression frequently backfires, and patronage rarely buys voluntary support.
Going forward, I aim first to complicate the conventional wisdom regarding autocratic po-
litical control. I will highlight indirect, informal, and innovative control strategies (e.g., infiltra-
tion, persuasion, and digital surveillance) rather than patronage and repression and explore the
role of dictators’ local political and bureaucratic agents operating outside the security appara-
tus. While examining these overlooked facets of political control, I will focus on two underlying
issues: First, how do dictators and local agents overcome obstacles to controlling citizens, such
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