Research - Jeremy Wallace
dissertation description, sample chapters, working papers, abstracts
Dissertation
Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Migration, and Authoritarian Resilience in China
Dissertation Committee: Jean Oi, chair; David Laitin, James Fearon, and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros
In my dissertation, I show that controlling for level of economic development, urbanization substantially increases the likelihood of authoritarian collapse in the post-WWII period. Most regimes respond to the threat of urban unrest by biasing policies to favor cities since urban denizens, due to their proximity to each other and the seat of power, are more politically powerful than rural residents. China, on the other hand, has focused on slowing the pace of migration to its most unstable cities and even begun subsidizing rural areas. What accounts for this anomalous shift? China fears “Latin Americanization”—slums, crime, and regime instability—and hopes to moderate movement to cities by making agriculture more economically attractive. This finding suggests a self-undermining secondary effect of urban bias that has been previously absent from the literature: it encourages urbanization, leading to larger cities in the future and increasing the long-term risk to the regime. However, bias towards cities remains endemic in developing non-democracies, as most governments do not have the luxury of avoiding these long-term costs due to short-term threats.
I pair analysis of Chinese social stability, urbanization, and fiscal statistics—collected during 16 months in the field—with a cross-national investigation of regime survival to test the argument. In the full dissertation, after laying out a simple formalization of the argument, I provide a national level narrative of China’s process of managing urbanization, focusing on its internal passport (hukou) system, the abolition of the agricultural tax, and the construction of a “new socialist countryside.” I then create an estimate of Chinese social instability at the provincial level based on a number of indicator variables, including crime statistics, public order incidents, collective labor disputes, unemployment, and petitions (xinfang). This estimate is then used as an independent variable in analyzing the distribution of center-to-province fiscal transfers. I find that transfers are directed to areas of instability as well as those exporting labor. Examination of the budgets of a random sample of counties shows that transfers are particularly targeted to rural areas near unstable cities. The dissertation concludes with a cross-national analysis that connects the causal chain from urban bias to urbanization to collective action to regime transition.
Writing Samples
The following writing samples are based on the first three chapters of my dissertation:
Cities and Stability: Urbanization and Non-Democratic Regime Survival
Cities and Stability: Directing Urbanization, Defining Unrest, and Distributing Transfers in China
For more information, please contact me.
CV
A copy of my CV is here.
Other Work
Taxation and Representation: The Effect of Competitive Elections in Local Chinese Governance (with K. Shimizu)
Political Correctness in the Cultural Revolution - Abstract
Zouping - Past & Present: The Next Generation of Research - Research Plan