Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

“Myth and Measurement: Spatial Heterogeneity, Ecological Fallacy, and the Urban Narrative in Peninsular Malaysia’s Electoral Politics.” 2026. Journal of East Asian Studies 26(1): 87–112. [Open Access] [Replication]

Does Malaysia vote along urban–rural lines or along ethnic ones? Combining aggregate election returns from Peninsular Malaysia with survey evidence and modeling spatial heterogeneity to guard against ecological fallacy, the paper shows that the celebrated urban–rural divide is largely an artifact of aggregation: ethnicity, not urbanization, remains the dominant cleavage structuring party competition. The result demonstrates that aggregate election data, analyzed with attention to spatial heterogeneity, can substitute for surveys in settings where reliable polling is scarce.

“Social Transformation in Malaysia and the Fragmentation of the Malay-Dominant Political Parties: Based on a Social Cleavage Structure Theory Perspective” (with Congcong Fu). Southeast Asian Studies (东南亚研究) 2021(3): 1–29. In Chinese. [Chinese Full Text] [English Translation on SSRN]

After Malaysia’s 2018 general election, five Malay-dominant parties held federal seats from Peninsular Malaysia alone, all tracing back to successive splits from UMNO. Drawing on social cleavage structure theory, the article argues that the fragmentation of Malay-dominant parties is the joint product of elite contradictions within political society and shifting cleavage structures within civil society. When intra-elite conflicts cannot be reconciled, or when a new social cleavage emerges, a new party is born; its survival depends on whether it can anchor itself to an existing or newly formed cleavage.

“Social Transformation, Dispute over Routes and the Split of Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS)” (with Congcong Fu). Southeast Asian Affairs (南洋问题研究) 2020(1): 79–95. In Chinese. [Chinese Full Text] [English Translation on SSRN]

The expansion of the Malay ethnic middle class and the imbalance of regional development weakened the Ulama faction and differentiated the professional group within the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), triggering a dispute over how to realize an Islamic state. The internal struggle culminated in the 2015 split that produced the National Trust Party (AMANAH). The article traces this process through the changing factional composition of PAS and argues that AMANAH’s long-term survival requires differentiated positioning relative to other Malay-based parties and a unified ideological foundation.

Under Review

“The Front Page and the Back Room: Demand Narrowing, Elite Coordination, and the Survival of Authoritarian Elites.” Under review at American Political Science Review.

When an authoritarian leader faces a crisis they may not survive, how does a divided elite coordinate on abandoning them before the moment passes? The paper argues that two features of the crisis resolve the elite’s coordination problem: a public signal that narrows the opposition’s demand onto the leader by name, making their removal a survivable exit, and a communication environment open enough for divided elites to read that narrowing as common knowledge. Where both hold, the elite sheds the leader and keeps its places; where the demand stays systemic, or never settles on a target, the elite closes ranks and the leader endures. A global-game model carries the mechanism, tested at two scales: a day-by-day reconstruction of the week of Soeharto’s fall in May 1998, coded daily across twenty-seven elites in two dailies, and a seven-crisis comparison that separates leader-removal from elite survival on the same two features. The leader falls; the elite survives.

“The Ramification of (Not) Being Governed: Colonial Rule, Social Density, and the Organization of Ethnic Politics in Post-Colonial Malaysia and Indonesia.” Under review at International Organization.

Research on colonial governance often argues that colonial states shaped post-colonial ethnic politics, but gives insufficient attention to ethnic groups’ own agency. Extending research on colonial legacies, I add a group-side variable, the baseline social density of an ethnic institution, and model its interaction with the colonial state’s decision to govern that institution or pass it over. I argue that the type of ethnic institutions that emerge, and how they interact with post-colonial states, depend on the interaction between how actively colonial states managed particular aspects of ethnic groups and how densely organized those groups were, which shaped how capable they were of resisting state intervention. Using controlled comparison and process tracing, I examine five ethnic institutions in Malaysia and Indonesia. I find that colonial-era interactions between state management and group organization can have enduring effects on post-colonial ethnic politics, even amid major political change.

“Symbolic Power and the Functional Divide: Campaigns Across the Party-State Spectrum.” Reject and invitation for resubmission at American Journal of Sociology.

Regimes differ in how fully the ruling party absorbs the state it governs, a range the paper calls the party-state spectrum. Across that spectrum, recurrent mobilizational campaigns are the instrument by which a party keeps the state it built subordinate to political ends. Drawing on seven decades of the Chinese party press, firm-level event studies that estimate campaigns’ economic impact, and daily social-media discourse, the paper documents campaigns’ functional logic: they discipline the state apparatus and renew the party’s symbolic authority over it.

Working Papers

“Dancing with Hands Tied: Elite Defection, Social Constraints, and the Breakdown of Dominant-Party Systems.” [SSRN]

The second paper of my dissertation, “Moving Ground.”

When and how do dominant-party systems break? The splits that end dominance begin within, after years of routine electoral dominance, led not by marginal politicians but by elites who rose nearly to the top of the party and then lost the internal contests that decide who runs it. Candidate-level career panels covering 4,638 candidate-elections in Malaysia’s UMNO (1959–2018), Japan’s LDP (1958–1993), and Taiwan’s KMT (1986–2001) identify which elites exit and when, conditional on a split. Because the party monopolizes access to office, losing an internal contest becomes a choice between marginalization and exit, and defection tracks the internal political calendar. Exits take two forms: bloc exits, when cohesive factions leave together after lost leadership struggles, and marginal exits, when weakened candidates depart alone. Whether a split ends dominance is decided downstream: breakaways endure only when they attach to a social cleavage the parent cannot absorb. Breakdown is an elite phenomenon in its onset and a cleavage phenomenon in its consequences.

“What Race and Ethnicity Hide: Bayesian Approximate Computation with Hierarchical Framework (BACH) for Subgroup Voting Behavior under Partisan Polarization, Cross-Cutting Cleavages, and Survey Nonresponse.” [SSRN] [Poster at PolMeth 2026]

The third paper of my dissertation, “Moving Ground.”

What subgroups of the electorate do is increasingly hidden by the group-level categories our estimators report. BACH couples approximate Bayesian computation with sequential Monte Carlo to infer group-level vote distributions from aggregate election returns: it recovers the full posterior distribution of votes cast by a fine-grained group, such as young college-educated White men, rather than a point estimate with an interval around a one-dimensional average. Even when reporting only race-level results, BACH provides more reliable estimates than classical ecological inference and multilevel regression with poststratification when intra-group heterogeneity is large and survey response is selective, and only BACH’s stated ordering probabilities are well calibrated. The framework is validated on simulations and on the Florida voter file, where national origin rather than education organizes Hispanic vote choice, a within-race cleavage that race-level estimators collapse. An open-source R package accompanies the paper.

“Research Note: A Higher-Order Method of Moments Approach to Ecological Inference under Extreme Survey Nonresponse.” [SSRN]

When surveys are unreliable or absent, as in historical elections and many democracies without polling infrastructure, how can we recover who votes for whom? This research note derives a method-of-moments estimator that exploits higher-order moments of the cross-unit distribution of aggregate election outcomes to identify group voting behavior without individual-level data, offering a closed-form alternative to simulation-based approaches.

“Research Note: Who Counts in 2030? Changes of Representation Under the Proposed Census Exclusions.”

“What the Slope Loses, the Intercepts Gain: Measurement Error and Misattributed Effects in Fixed- and Random-Effects Models” (with Robert Franzese). Under revision.

Fixed- and random-effects models compare each unit to itself over time. When a treatment moves slowly but its measure carries fast-moving error, the within transformation strips out the signal and keeps the noise, and the effect it loses does not simply attenuate; it migrates into the unit intercepts, masquerading as stable “unit characteristics.” Larger samples make this worse, tightening confidence intervals around the wrong value and driving the Hausman test toward the most biased specification. The paper proves the result, establishes a scope condition (unit effects worsen attenuation only when the signal is more persistent than the error), and supplies a diagnose–correct–redesign protocol validated on three datasets.

“Plant Closures and Trump-Related Twitter Discussion: A Spatial-Temporal Description” (with Robert Franzese). Under revision.

How do local economic shocks shape online political extremism? Using a national geocoded tweet corpus matched to plant-closure events across the United States, the paper traces how local plant-closure shocks shaped Trump-related and extremist engagement on social media, mapping the spatial and temporal diffusion of economic-grievance discourse.

Work in Progress

“Choosing Voters: Population Policy, Categorical Redistricting, and the Building of a Competitive Authoritarian Regime.”

The first paper of my dissertation, “Moving Ground.”

The paper shows how competitive authoritarian regimes can combine population policy and categorical redistricting to build electoral districts that can sustain their rule through multiple elections.

“Why the Campaign Came Back: Bureaucratization and the Return of Mobilizational Governance in China.”

“When Do Ruling Parties Campaign Against Their Own States? The Party-State Spectrum” (with Mary Gallagher and Zhen Zhang).

The project takes the party-state spectrum from “Symbolic Power and the Functional Divide” and develops it into a general comparative framework.

“Three Clocks of the Aging Electorate: Period, Cohort, and the Misread Stability of the Senior Bloc in Japan and South Korea” (with Wooseok Kim).

The study separates the period, cohort, and life-cycle clocks behind the apparent stability of senior voting blocs.