Registration is required for non CUID holders to access the Morningside campus. Attendees must present a government-issued ID with their name matching exactly the name registered for the event, along with an one-time QR code (via email), for entry. For non CUID holders, please register by 4 pm on Sept. 6 for entry onto campus.
For a list of entries onto campus, please click here.
Speaker: Jiangnan Zhu, Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Junyan Jiang, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Professor Zhu will be presenting her ongoing research on public support of government policies in China. Social control policies sometimes can be repressive and state repression in autocracies has long been assumed to elicit explicit or implicit disapproval from citizens. Recent studies suggest that authoritarian governments can garner support for repressive policies through active information manipulation or exploiting social cleavages. However, is it possible for citizens to support social control even without government manipulation? In this study, Professor Zhu and her coauthors propose the “authoritarian cue effect”, arguing that citizens’ attitudes toward state repression can be endogenously shaped by instances of state repression, which may be interpreted as cueing messages signaling the regime’s disapproval of the punished behaviors. Using a novel belief correction survey experiment from China, they empirically demonstrate that state repression can induce the public to pick up on cues and automatically adopt the state’s stance, perceiving repressed behavior as having more negative externalities and supporting state repression more. This cue effect suggests that social control of authoritarian governments can self-legitimize and evade public opinion backlash in a less costly manner than previously presumed.
Speaker’s Bio: Jiangnan Zhu is a professor of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and director of the Contemporary China Studies program. Her research primarily focuses on corruption and anticorruption, elite politics, and public opinion in China. She has published many articles in leading journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Public Administrative Review, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, etc., and authored book chapters for various publications. She is the editor of the Journal of Chinese Political Science and an editorial board member of Public Administration. She frequently serves as a reviewer of renowned journals, major research grants, and award committees. She received the Research Output Prize and the Social Sciences Outstanding Supervisor Award at HKU.
She holds a Ph. D. in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Mathematical Models of Social Sciences from Northwestern University.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.
Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
