In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
South Korea's Democratic Decay
South Korea is following global trends as it slides toward a “democratic depression.” Both the spirit of democracy and actual liberal-democratic standards are under attack.
The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century
Southeast Asian and Chinese perceptions of each other are examined using survey research and by asking whether China views the region as its “strategic backyard.”
Author Vincent Barletta explores rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century.
Key policy takeaways from Amy Zegart on new strategies in U.S. intelligence; Rose Gottemoeller on maintaining nuclear nonproliferation; Michael McFaul on military support for Ukraine; Gi Wook Shin on South Korea’s presidential election; and the final report from the Virality Project on vaccine misinformation.
We study how an elite college education affects social mobility in China. China provides an interesting context because its college admissions rely mainly on the scores of a centralized exam, a system that has been the subject of intense debate. Combining the data from a large-scale college graduate survey and a nationally representative household survey, we document three main findings. First, attending an elite college can change one's fate. It significantly raises the child's rank in the income distribution. Nevertheless, it does not change the intergenerational relationship in income ranks or guarantee one's entry into an elite occupation or industry. Second, although access to elite colleges increases with parental income, the income gradient is much flatter than in the United States. Third, the score-based cutoff rule in elite college admission is income neutral. Overall, these findings reveal the efficacy and limitations of China's elite colleges in shaping social mobility.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,
March 16, 2022
Extant research continues to establish the importance of teacher job satisfaction to student performance, yet teacher job satisfaction remains under-investigated in rural China. In this paper, we examine the prevalence and correlates of teacher job satisfaction. Using data from 634 teachers across 120 schools in rural China, we find an alarmingly high prevalence of teacher job dissatisfaction: roughly 21% of rural teachers were less than satisfied with their jobs. In addition, we find that several individual- and school-level characteristics, including being a male teacher, being a homeroom teacher, not having a management role in school, being a middle-aged teacher, and a school’s boarding status, are correlated with teacher job dissatisfaction. In sum, the results demonstrate a need for further research and policy interventions to improve teacher job satisfaction in rural schools.
The disruptive power of the pandemic has rippled across the social determinants of child health. Just several months after the first cases were detected in the United States, the unemployment rate reached levels not seen since the depths of the Great Depression, with the majority of lost jobs concentrated in low-wage industries. Two-thirds of child care centers closed by April 2020, one-third remaining closed by April 2021. Recent reports estimate that more than one-third of households with children were experiencing either housing hardships or inadequate food, privations that fell disproportionately on racial and ethnic minority families. School closures have been widespread with wildly uneven capacities to respond by district. This has resulted in disparities potentially affecting children’s long-term learning and patterns of mortality over the life course.
During COVID-19, the public health toll of vaccine misinformation has risen from bothersome to titanic. As many as 12 million persons may have forgone COVID-19 vaccination in the US because of misinformation, resulting in an estimated 1200 excess hospitalizations and 300 deaths per day. If 5 fully loaded 747s crashed each week due to wrong information, regulators would be apoplectic.
This study documents the COVID-19 disease-control measures enacted in rural China and examines the economic and social impacts of these measures. We conducted two rounds of surveys with 726 randomly selected village informants across seven provinces. Strict disease-control measures have been universally enforced and appear to have been successful in limiting disease transmission in rural communities. The infection rate in our sample was 0.001 per cent, a rate that is near the national average outside of Hubei province. None of the villages reported any COVID-19-related deaths. For a full month during the quarantine, the rate of employment of rural workers was essentially zero. Even after the quarantine measures were lifted, nearly 70 per cent of the villagers still were unable to work owing to workplace closures. Although action has been taken to mitigate the potential negative effects, these disease-control measures might have accelerated the inequality between rural and urban households in China.
Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study. We organize and review this growing welter of research under the concept of digital repression by expanding a typology that distinguishes actions based on actor type, whether actions are overt or covert, and whether behaviors are shaped by coercion or channeling. This delineation between broadly different forms of digital repression allows researchers to develop expectations about digital repression, better understand what is “new” about digital repression in terms of explanatory factors, and better understand the consequences of digital repression.
A disinformation researcher shares what she and her team watch for when analyzing social media posts and other online reports related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine (originally appeared in Stanford News)
In Strategy in the Contemporary World, edited by John Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Jeannie L. Johnson, Oriana Skylar Mastro examines the evolution of Chinese grand strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, its drivers, and its implications.
The cost-effectiveness of policies providing subsidized health goods is often compromised by limited use of the goods provided. Through a randomized trial involving 251 primary schools in western China, we tested two approaches to improve the cost-effectiveness of a program distributing free eyeglasses to myopic children. Relative to delivery of free eyeglasses to schools, we find that providing vouchers redeemable in local optical shops modestly improved the targeting of eyeglasses to those who would use them without reducing effective coverage. Information provided through a health education campaign increased eyeglass use when eyeglasses were delivered to schools, but had no effect when requiring voucher redemption or when families were only given a prescription for eyeglasses to be purchased on the market. Though most expensive, free delivery to schools with a health education campaign was the most socially cost-effective approach tested and increased effective coverage of eyeglasses by 18.5 percentage points after seven months.
Key policy takeaways from Didi Kuo on U.S. electoral reforms; Keith Humphreys on the opioid epidemic; Oriana Skylar Mastro on China-North Korea relations; and Michael McFaul and Francis Fukuyama on the Ukraine-Russia crisis.
In a new Lawfare piece Jim Dempsey of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, makes a case for breaking out a critical (and often unused) tool in the cybersecurity toolbox: the leveraging of authority by federal agencies to improve the cybersecurity of private actors.
Pascaline Dupas and co-authors Agness, Baseler, Chassang, and Snowberg leverage individual choice data they generate on farmers in western Kenya to solve a general problem: do behavioral phenomena drive individual choices when trading off cash for time, or cash and time for goods?