Research

Working Papers

▸ “Gendered Expressions of Loyalty: How Women Play the Sycophant Card.” Under Review

Where loyalty is highly valued, why are women more likely to pander to autocrats than men? Standard theories contend that subordinates display excessive loyalty to substitute for limited political competence. For women, a double-bind emerges: demonstrating skill is integral to improving their political prospects, yet risks backlash for exhibiting gender-incongruent behavior in conservative contexts. I argue that loyalty legitimizes rather than compensates for women’s competence, offering a gendered pathway to power adhering to social expectations. I evaluate speeches from the 26-27th Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Using natural language processing, I find that gender shapes the frequency, form, and effectiveness of sycophancy. Women not only profess greater loyalty to autocrats, but employ gender-congruent praise emphasizing their compassion. These appeals yield material rewards, boosting their electoral prospects in subsequent terms. This research complicates the standard loyalty-competence tradeoff, revealing how gender shapes pathways to political advancement under authoritarianism.

▸ “Weaponizing Women’s Voices: Hypocrisy Claims and the Erosion of Women’s Rights in Autocracies” with Stephanie Char Revise & Resubmit

Authoritarian regimes routinely restrict women’s rights while claiming to champion them. How do such regimes defend against criticism when actively undermining the very rights they claim to advance? We identify one rhetorical strategy: hypocrisy claims, or accusations that political opponents themselves violate standards they profess to uphold. We theorize that authoritarian regimes intensify hypocrisy claims following restrictions on women’s rights, with regime women disproportionately invoking their gendered authority and delivering these claims. Using natural language processing on speeches from the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2015-2023), we find hypocrisy claims significantly increased after Turkey’s 2021 withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, with no comparable increase following controversial rhetoric or unrelated crises. Regime women disproportionately drive this rhetorical shift compared to their male counterparts. These findings reveal how autocracies weaponize hypocrisy claims and women’s political voice to deflect criticism and legitimize the erosion of women’s rights.

▸ “Multilateral Messaging: International Organizations, Social Media, and Public Opinion” with Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark Revise & Resubmit

A central purpose of international organizations (IOs) is to communicate information to member states. Yet little is known about how IOs interface with publics, particularly through newer channels like social media. In this paper, we argue that IOs leverage social media to bolster popular support, and this strategy can be effective. We focus on IOs’ attempts to counter populist narratives that they are elite, out-of-touch organizations. To test our theory, we first use novel Twitter data from 2012-2022, showing that IOs adopt rhetoric designed to appeal to ordinary people on Twitter, which increases engagement with these bodies. Next, we leverage an original survey experiment that manipulates how IOs are portrayed to show that populist-style messages from IO opinion leaders can effectively boost support for IOs. Our findings highlight the agency of IOs in the social media age and add nuance to debates about the fraught relationship between populism and global governance.

▸ “Gender and Party Loyalty Under Electoral Authoritarianism: Evidence from Turkey” Honorable Mention, Empirical Study of Gender Research Network 2024.

In regimes with strong expectations of party loyalty among politicians, why do gendered differences in loyalty emerge? Party loyalty carries a high premium in electoral autocracies, yet information to discern such loyalty is scarce. As political outsiders, women present a distinct information problem. I argue that dominant parties possess both the incentive and capacity to resolve the information problem to select highly loyal women. Empirically, I leverage original text data from over 800 members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey from 2015 to 2023. Using natural language processing, I find that women consistently outpace their men co-partisans in publicly signaling their loyalty in the dominant party, but not in opposition parties. Results further show that dominant party women strategically engage with less controversial women’s interests, while avoiding more contentious domains. These findings reveal how authoritarian parties shape the selection of loyalist women and their subsequent behavior in office.

▸ “Echoes of Erosion: Communicating Foreign Democratic Backsliding in Autocratizing Regimes” with Tony Zirui Yang and Eddy S. F. Yeung Under Review

Political communication plays an important role in shaping the trajectory of global democratic decline and resilience. While existing scholarship focuses on how domestic factors enable illiberal actors to undermine democracy, less is known about how politicians communicate democratic erosion abroad to reorient domestic discourse about democracy. We argue that in countries experiencing autocratization, elites have strategic incentives to contest narratives of foreign democratic erosion by framing their rivals as threats to democracy. While opposition elites can draw parallels between foreign and domestic illiberal actors and make democracy a salient issue for voters, incumbents have incentives to undermine the opposition’s issue ownership over democracy by reframing foreign backsliding as evidence of the dangers posed by pluralism and their opponents. To evaluate our argument, we draw on a large corpus of social media data to analyze how politicians in three autocratizing regimes, Hungary, Poland, and Türkiye, publicly communicated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, a globally salient episode of democratic erosion. Across three countries, we uncover strikingly similar communication patterns: opposition elites extensively used US backsliding to warn against domestic illiberalism, whereas ruling party elites framed the event as a security threat and countercharged the opposition as endangering democracy. By unpacking such competitive framing dynamics, our study highlights a key mechanism through which foreign democratic erosion shapes domestic political discourse and partisan conflict that subsequently contributes to the diffusion of illiberal norms across the world.

Works in Progress

▸ “Appealing to Democracy: Strategic Variation in Authoritarian Democratic Rhetoric” with Eddy S. F. Yeung and Scott Williamson

▸ “Mass Understandings of Free and Fair Elections” with Eddy S. F. Yeung, Jonathan A. Chu, Bardia Rahmani, and Scott Williamson

▸ “Uncertainties and Voter Support for Anti- and Pro-Democratic Politicians: Evidence from a Ten-Country Experiment” with Eddy S. F. Yeung, Jonathan A. Chu, and Scott Williamson

▸ “Peer Pressure: Interstate Criticism and Treaty Ratification” with Stephanie Char

▸ “IOs and Post-Hegemonic Reconfiguration” with Allison Carnegie