Research

Publications

• “The Invisible Impact of Conflict: A Study of Terrorism, Regime Type and the Shadow Economy”, International Interactions, 2024. (with Da Sul Kim) [Link]

  Does terrorism contribute to the growth of the shadow economy? Employing data on terrorism and the shadow economies of 116 countries from 1990 to 2017, we demonstrate that terrorism results in an increase in the size of the shadow economy and that the effect is larger in autocracies. We argue that political instability caused by terrorism leads to the erosion of institutional trust and social capital. Furthermore, ineffective and repressive counterterrorism measures in autocracies further hamper the economic pursuits of individuals, businesses, and foreign investors, which facilitates engagement in informal economic activities. We use the generalized method of moments to deal with the endogeneity, which supports the findings.

Works Under Review

• Exporting Autocrat’s Playbook? Diverging Impacts of China and Russia on Contemporary Democratic Backsliding (Revise and Resubmit at Democratization, with Woojeong Jang)

  What roles do China and Russia play in contemporary backsliding? Under what conditions do they succeed or fail in spreading illiberal practices? Conducting difference-in-differences analyses, we contend that Chinese governance model, digital authoritarianism, has increasingly spread to the periphery of the dominant international order after 2014 while the Russian model of super-presidentialism, once prevalent in the former Soviet bloc, has experienced significant setbacks after 2014 due to Russia’s growing reputation as a security threat.

• Witnessing Protests Abroad and Political Trust at Home: A Natural Experiment of the Mahsa Amini Protests and Public Opinion in the Arab World

  While Mahsa Amini’s death in Iran 2022 sparked massive wave of protests and drew significant international attention, these events did not resonate significantly within neighboring Arab countries. What impact, if any, did this incident have on Arab public opinion, if not altering political behavior? Bringing evidence from a natural experiment of an interrupted observational survey in Libya and Mauritania, I find that exposure to the protests briefly improved both institutional trust and perception of corruption among respondents. Social media, on the other hand, mitigated such effects as those with social media access were more likely to develop negative views of their domestic institutions after observing the protests.

Works in Progress

• Political Framing of Repression and Popular Support: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Tunisia (with Ashley Anderson)

  When does state repression garner popular support in nondemocracies? Conducting a survey experiment in Tunisia, we leverage varying framings of counterterrorism efforts with a focus on the type of violence (selective vs. widespread) and the degree of identifiability of the targets (high vs. low) to gauge popular support for the states’ use of violence.

• Does Arab-Israeli Conflict Unite or Divide? An Automated Text Analysis of Nasser’s Speeches and Egyptian Foreign Policy Towards Palestine

  Analyzing latent topics embedded in 393 speech documents by Gamal Abdel Nasser, I find a discernable shift in his national role conception from a ‘pan-Arab leader’ to ‘Egyptian sovereign state’ following the Six-Day War in 1967. The findings suggest that the Arab-Israeli conflict has prompted Arab states to emphasize their own national interests rather than collective Arab goals, leading to a deprioritization of the Palestinian issue.