Research

Political Control in the Workplace: How Autocracies Discipline Workers Without Distorting Firm Behavior (Job Market Paper)

As autocracies marketize, regimes face a dilemma: market expansion concentrates workers in privately managed workplaces where they can be mobilized against the regime, yet political intrusion to reassert control risks distorting markets. I argue that organizationally dense one-party regimes manage this tension by embedding weak but visible political institutions inside workplaces that discipline workers rather than firms and operate through symbolic presence rather than punishment. I test this argument through a multi-level analysis of Communist Party cells in China’s private firms, combining firm-level panel data, employee surveys, survey experiments, and fieldwork. The results reveal a cross-level asymmetry: party cells do not systematically alter firm behavior, yet their visibility politicizes the workplace and induces employee self-censorship. Survey experiments show that merely priming a cell’s presence suppresses dissent and heightens perceived risks in workplace discussions. These findings highlight a market-compatible form of control that penetrates everyday economic life while preserving market activity.

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Strong State, Weak Enforcement: Bureaucratic Forbearance of China's Social Insurance Policies (forthcoming 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