The Dyanamics of Digital Claims-Making Under Authoritarian Rule

My dissertation project explores how ordinary people engage in politics under authoritarian rule, not through protests or revolutions, but through everyday digital actions like filing complaints, signing petitions, and sharing grievances online. While often dismissed as “low-effort” participation, these activities offer a powerful window into how citizens navigate political constraints and how governments respond. Drawing on large-scale text data from China and original survey experiments in Thailand and India, this project follows the full life cycle of digital claims-making. The first article shows that citizens strategically frame how they communicate with the state, sometimes adopting official rhetoric and performing loyalty to the state, but that such strategy can backfire. The second article examines how exposure to others’ claims influences participation and emulation, highlighting the importance of cues like participation size, identity and social status. The third article investigates mass online campaigns, demonstrating that large-scale participation only matters when combined with meaningful individual effort. Together, this research reveals that even the most mundane forms of digital participation are strategic, unequal, and politically consequential, reshaping how we understand state-society interaction in the digital age.

1. Thirst Traps and Quick Cuts: The Effects of TikTok ‘Edits’ on Evaluations of Politicians, with Kevin Munger. Forthcoming at Social Media + Society.

Abstract: TikTok and the associated technologies for recording and editing short-form video constitute a large and growing portion of online communication. Previous modalities of social media, including static images and especially text, engendered significant attention to the facticity of the communication: was a statement true or false? Did an event actually take place? For a certain genre of stylized, highly edited short-form video, this is besides the point – which is to produce a compelling video that portrays a prominent figure in a particular light. We conduct an experiment to evaluate whether “edits” of prominent politicians can change voter perceptions. We find that “thirst trap” edits cause an increase in perceptions of politician attractiveness, and that “badass” edits improve overall evaluations of Donald Trump (but not Joe Biden). Descriptively, we present a distribution of the evaluations of the attractiveness of Trump, Biden, Bernie Sanders and Robert F. Kennedy Jr (“RFK”), demonstrating significant variation.

2. Learning Protest: How National Protest Contexts Influence Adolescents’ Views of Unconventional Political Participation, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Shan-Jan Sarah Liu, Under Review

Abstract: Protest has become a normal form of political participation in many countries, although the degree to which protest is considered a legitimate form of civic engagement varies both across countries and across individuals within countries. This paper explores how national protest contexts influence adolescents’ protest propensity. Using cross-national surveys of 14-year-olds from 42 democracies, we show that adolescents are more willing to engage in lesser-known forms of peaceful protests than institutionalized, confrontational, or violent activities. Furthermore, using a quasi-experiment of a large protest of the G-20 meeting during the fielding of the 2009 survey in England, we demonstrate that a highly visible protest event can change adolescents’ propensity and attitude towards engaging in protest in the short run. This paper expands our knowledge of how national contexts affect adolescents’ different protest activities, raising implications for how democracies create environments that cultivate and improve civic engagement at a young age.

• Presented at 2023 Annual MPSA Conference, 2023

3. Performing Loyalty: Does Adopting State Rhetoric Make Citizen’s Demands-making More Successful?”, Under Review

Abstract: Does performing loyalty to the state lead to better outcomes for citizens under authoritarian rule? Existing literature on civil resistance in authoritarian regimes implicitly assumes that when citizens adopt the language of the state in their claims-making, they increase their chances of success. However, using text data from China’s Mayor’s Mailbox—a digital petition platform through which citizens appeal to local leaders—I find adopting state rhetoric leads to worse outcomes. Further analysis reveals that this effect is conditional on the level of political threat. When demands are more threatening, state rhetoric becomes more effective. An online survey experiment in India supports the behavioral mechanisms uncovered in the observational data. These findings contribute to our understanding of everyday resistance under authoritarianism. Performing loyalty not only imposes costs but may also radicalize individuals following failed engagements with the state, thereby contributing to explaining autocratic instability and democratization.

• Presented at 2024 Annual SPSA Conference, Conference-within-a-Conference:“The Politics of Authoritarian Regimes”

4. Speaking as One: Mass Petition Campaigns in Authoritarian China, Job Market Paper

Abstract: How do citizens make their voice heard and change government behavior under authoritarian rule when mass mobilization is risky and increasingly rare? I examine mass petitioning—high-volume campaigns of identical or near-duplicate petitions submitted to authorities—and assess its implications for state responsiveness. I argue that mass petitions are often rejected because their low-effort, high-volume format signals low political threat to bureaucrats. Using text data from over 100,000 online public complaints submitted to Chinese city governments, I employ a text-reuse detection method to identify more than 4,000 mass petition campaigns. Analyses show that local governments are more likely to reject mass petitions than individual submissions, but this negative association is attenuated when participants substantially modify the form letter, indicating higher effort. This article shows how citizens adapt collective claims-making to online channels and advances understanding of emerging forms of contention under authoritarian rule.

• Presented at 2025 Annual APSA Conference
• Presented at 2025 Fall Chinese Politics Research in Progress

5. Framing Conflict: Shifting Conflict Narratives during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Cyanne E. Loyle

Abstract: In times of war and peace, governments strategically use rhetoric to generate support for their policies and actions. Particularly in times of conflict, governments rally the troops and their country behind their war policies through the way they speak about and frame their actions. While scholars have long recognized the importance of rhetoric in politics, issue frames have been notoriously hard to measure. Recent methodological developments in natural language processing allow for new data to be brought to bear on the topic of how issues are framed. Furthermore, these innovations allow for new theoretical advances in how and why frame shifts occur. Using these techniques, we examine the concept of dynamic issue framing in the case of the thirty-year civil war in Northern Ireland. We identify the dominant conflict frames propagated by the British government and study the conditions under which these frames shift overtime. How governments talk about a conflict matters for its policies as well as public support for its actions. Through understanding how the British government framed its engagement in Northern Ireland we can learn more about the politics of issue framing in democracies at war and beyond.

• Presented at Online Peace Science Colloquium, 2023
• Presented at Junior Scholars in Quantitative Conflict, 2024

6. Drivers of Connective Actions: Evidence from Two Survey Experiments", Work in Progress

7. State Repression and the Law: Domestic Lawfare, Autocratic Legalism, and the Future of the Judiciary", with Cyanne E. Loyle, Cecilia Cavero Sánchez and Lesley Zhang, Work in Progress

Teaching Assistant: PLSC 498 Text-As-Data, Fall 2022

Graduate Advisor: Political Science Horizons at Penn State, Fall 2022

• Undergraduate mentorship program for career success in Political Science

Guest Lecture: GLIS 102 Global Pathways, Spring 2025

• “Human Rights and Regime Type”

Workshop Instructor: Open Scholarship Bootcamp, Summer 2025

• “LLMs with Jupyter Notebooks”, workshop materials