Research

Political Control in the Workplace: How Autocrats Use Firms to Discipline Citizens (Job Market Paper)

How do authoritarian regimes maintain control as their private sectors grow? While existing research emphasizes control mechanisms outside the private sector such as security forces and surveillance, less is known about how the state extends control from within it. This study examines the Chinese state’s use of Communist Party cells to penetrate firms and shape employee behavior. An original panel of 1,208 publicly listed private enterprises (2012-2022) shows that while party cells have expanded rapidly, they exert little influence on firm behavior. Yet employee-level evidence tells a different story. Even weak and ritualized party cells increase the visibility of the party and heighten employees’ sense of being monitored. Survey experiments show that merely priming the presence of a party cell suppresses dissent and increases perceived risks in workplace discussions. These findings highlight a subtle strategy by one-party regimes to reconcile market growth with political control: targeting individuals, not business, and ruling through presence, not punishment.

Draft coming soon

Strong State, Weak Enforcement: Bureaucratic Forbearance of China's Social Insurance Policies (conditionally accepted at Political Science Research and Methods)

Why would a strong authoritarian state choose not to enforce its own policy? We extend the theory of forbearance to authoritarian regimes, highlighting its distinct incentives and characteristics. Using China’s social insurance policies as a case study, we argue that promotion-driven local officials, competing in selective political tournaments where advancement depends heavily on GDP performance, allow firms to evade payroll taxes in order to boost local economies and their own career prospects. This effect is most significant among domestic private firms and foreign firms. We conduct one of the first systematic analysis of firm-level social insurance contributions in an authoritarian context, supplemented by individual-level survey data. Our findings show that bureaucratic forbearance of China’s social insurance policies has a pro-business bias, undermining the policies originally designed to address inequalities during market reforms.

Link to paper