Category: Uncategorized
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Returning to China’s Urbanization
Thanks to Bill Bishop and others, my post on China’s urbanization and democracy, Urbanization Won’t Drive Chinese Democracy, has had something of a second life. I wanted to take the opportunity then to connect that piece and my other arguments to the recent and excellent special report from The Economist on China’s urbanization. Getting cities right will help […]
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Meanings of Means
Social scientists tend to propose and test hypotheses of the following type: Hypothesis: As [our explanatory variable] increases, [our outcome variable] also increases, all else equal. The way that hypotheses of this sort are tested is by compiling a large data set and examining if in a multivariate framework there exists a positive coefficient on […]
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Bias and Manipulation
I am on the record as having doubts about the validity of some official Chinese economic statistics. Provincial level GDP growth rates jump at moments of political turnover in excess of their electricity consumption and after controlling for other economic changes. I argue that data manipulation is the most likely cause of this discrepancy. The […]
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Urbanization Won’t Drive Chinese Democracy
Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post has a short column with the following explosive title: Urbanisation will drive democracy The piece begins: The greatest driver for democracy in China will not come from its dissidents, overseas subversives or bleeding-heart expatriate busybodies. It will come from the Communist Party’s own urbanisation drive. There is […]
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Today’s China is Communist and Modern, Not High Modernist
The Chinese government released its long-awaited urbanization plan (国家新型城镇化规划) on 16 March. Ian Johnson, who has written extensively about China’s urbanization for the New York Times, begins his piece on the announcement of the plan in grand terms: China has announced a sweeping plan to manage the flow of rural residents into cities, promising to promote urbanization […]
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Seven Deadly Sins — Fresh from the Journals
Phil Schrodt’s influential paper on the “Seven deadly sins of contemporary quantitative political analysis” is now published in the March 2014 issue of the Journal of Peace Research. Here’s the abstract: A combination of technological change, methodological drift and a certain degree of intellectual sloth, particularly with respect to philosophy of science, has allowed contemporary […]
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Fresh from the Journals
Kezhou Xiao and Brantly Womack have a new article, entitled “Distortion and Credibility within China’s Internal Information System” at the Journal of Contemporary China. Here’s the abstract: Behind the problems of credibility of public official information in China lie two patterns of internal information distortion, one restricting the downward flow of sensitive general information and […]
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Nighttime Lights and More
Joshua Keating at Slate continues his good work popularizing interesting social science research. Last year, he said some nice things about my paper on cities, redistribution, and authoritarian regime survival, writing for Foreign Policy. Today, he writes about the value of satellite imagery of nighttime lights in determining the level of poverty in a country, based […]
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Politics in the Way
Tom Flores pointed out a great bit of an interview conducted by Foreign Affairs with former Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: Won’t politics always get in the way of technocratic reforms? It’s not insurmountable, but we need a social contract where everybody agrees that certain things have to be done. I don’t think we have that in […]
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Anti-Japanese Protest Locations
This image comes from a new working paper (with Jessica Weiss) looking at the political economy of nationalist protest in China. Here’s the abstract: Why do some cities take part in waves of nationalist protest but not others? Nationalist protest remains an important but understudied topic within the study of contentious politics in China, particularly […]
Jeremy Wallace 