Research

My research interest revolves around topics that include comparative political behavior, democratic backsliding, immigration, polarization, and populism. I am particularly interested in Asian politics as well as North American politics as regional interests. In addition to those, methodologically, I have a strong interest in exploring political text with machine learning techniques. In this section, I would like to share my exciting research projects that are either under review or in progress.

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Abstract: The ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic requires effective crisis communication among public leaders. While previous works of literature have examined how elected officials such as state governors have implemented public health policies, and implemented communication strategies to interact with the public, less has been focused during the early stages of the crisis. This is important because Covid-19 is still ongoing but the extant information available now is of significant value, which was not readily available to citizens or policymakers such as State governors. So, it is important to examine how the best public health message was disseminated. This study aims to answer two research questions, 1) how did state governors communicate with citizens on Twitter during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic? 2) how did citizens respond to the state governors from different partisanship on Twitter during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic? The study applies computational methods to analyze 47,831 tweets posted by all 50 state governors from March 1st, 2020, to August 31st, 2020. Text mining results show that COVID-19 is the main theme among the governors' tweets during the first six months of the crisis. The quantitative description shows that governors’ crisis communication pattern on Twitter is in conjunction with the change witnessed in the COVID-19 cases. Regression analysis finds that social media activeness has mixed effects on citizen endorsement and information diffusion. The results also find a variation in the governor's tweets' activeness and citizen engagement based on partisanship.

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Abstract: How does regime type affect third-party mediation in civil conflict? Prior research shows that the regime types of the mediator and host government shape the likelihood of conflict mediation occurring. However, we know little about how the host government’s regime type shapes conflict mediation outcomes. We fill this gap in the literature by developing a theory arguing that regimes with higher audience costs are more constrained, and thus less likely to reach an agreement that is acceptable among disputants. Specifically, mediation success is more likely when the government fighting the rebel group is autocratic, because these regimes are ceteris paribus less constrained by domestic audience costs than democracies. Counterintuitively, internal features of democracies may be unfavorable towards resolving civil conflict because of democratic leaders’ fear of getting punished in future elections for unpopular mediated settlements. We find a robust positive relationship between autocratic incumbent governments and mediation success. These findings contribute to a growing literature that links domestic constraints to intrastate dynamics and suggests that scholarship on mediation and civil conflict must consistently take regime type into account.

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