Comparative Politics & Methods
Dissertation Title: “Three Essays on Information Environments, Mass Communication, and Democratization in Southeast Asia”
Committee: Dan Slater (co-chair), Allen Hicken (co-chair), Pauline Jones, Christopher Fariss, Yuri Zhukov (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and Department of Government)
Summary: My research focuses on the intersection of authoritarian information control and mass political behavior. Specifically, I examine how censorship and mass communications shape the public information environment and, in turn, affect political attitudes and contention in post-colonial authoritarian regimes. I focus on Southeast Asia, a region where I have conducted fieldwork and on which I have experience as a foreign policy and development analyst. I employ mixed methods, including in-depth interviews with difficult-to-reach populations, quasi-experimental methods, and automated text analysis, to understand the causes and consequences of information control. My findings have implications for authoritarian regimes both within and outside of Southeast Asia.
My dissertation sheds light on different forms of resistance to democratization in Southeast Asia: grassroots activism by uncivil society, digital repression of pro-democracy protests, and military intervention. My first paper, titled “Nationalism without Populism: Threats to Ideological Hegemony and Resurgent Nationalism in Myanmar” is under review at Comparative Political Studies; I argue that it was the breakdown of an old authoritarian religious monopoly that explains why prominent Buddhist monks encouraged discrimination and violence against a vulnerable Muslim population during Myanmar’s transition from military rule. In a second paper, my co-author and I use a difference-in-differences design to demonstrate how internet shutdowns in post-coup Myanmar reduce anti-regime protests but have no effect on armed conflict events. My third paper uses a cross-national statistical analysis of democratization in military regimes and a small-n comparison of Myanmar’s and Indonesia’s political transitions to demonstrate how military enmeshment in the domestic economy explains why some military regimes remain entrenched in politics while others extricate themselves from power.
My ongoing and future research focuses on the role of social media and state propaganda in contention and public opinion formation. I have two co-authored papers, one in the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics and another in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, that examine how digital activism challenges authoritarian rule and how social media facilitates inter-ethnic bonds within a fractured resistance movement in Myanmar. In future research, I plan to examine the international dimensions of nationalism in Southeast Asia, focusing on public opinion towards China and the United States. Given increasing geopolitical competition in the region, understanding public opinion in Southeast Asia has important implications for U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific.
