Research

One question runs through my research program: when and how do party systems realign or come apart as the population groups beneath them move, grow, shrink, and re-cluster? The dissertation argues that parties stand not on individual voters but on territorially arranged groups; the same electorate can sustain a coalition under one spatial arrangement and break it under another. When urbanization, migration, or generational replacement re-sorts those groups, voter blocs realign from below and elites defect from within. The argument is developed across the United States, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Japan.

On the voter side, the Journal of East Asian Studies article shows that Malaysia’s celebrated urban–rural divide is largely an artifact of aggregation, leaving ethnicity the dominant axis of competition, and a working paper traces how urbanization dismantled the ruling coalition’s patronage machine settlement by settlement, decades before its formal defeat; a dissertation component in development follows Latino voters in the United States as they move and cluster. On the elite side, dominant parties manufacture their own splits: elites defect when they lose internal contests, and regime elites coordinate collective abdication through public signals.

Because these questions outrun existing tools, the methodological strand builds new ones, above all the Bayesian Approximate Computation with Hierarchical framework (BACH), a simulation-based ecological-inference estimator for subgroup voting behavior under survey nonresponse, partisan polarization, and cross-cutting cleavages.

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]

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 the political society and shifting cleavage structures within the 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]

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

“Morning News: Public Signals, Elite Defections, and the Collective Abdication of Authoritarian Regimes.”

When a survival crisis breaks, how do dispersed regime elites coordinate their exit? A global game model shows that public signals (the morning’s front page) serve as the coordination device. An original day-by-day dataset tracking elite public stances during Indonesia’s 1998 transition tests the mechanism: leaders fall where wide public channels meet leader-specific demands, combining archival media coding with a formal model of decentralized elite coordination under uncertainty.

“Colonial Institutionalization and Unborn Civil Society in Post-Colonial States: Malaysia and Indonesia in Comparative Perspective.”

Why do some communal institutions survive decades of hostile policy while comparable ones next door are extinguished? Through a comparative-historical analysis of Malaysia and Indonesia, the paper traces the divergence to colonial-era decisions: whether the colonial state chose to register, codify, or spatially contain civil-sphere domains. These decisions set the institutional terrain on which postcolonial communal politics still runs, even as independent governments pursued divergent strategies toward communal organization.

“Symbolic Power and the Functional Divide: Campaigns Across the Party-State Spectrum.”

Across the party-state 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

“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]

A simulation-based ecological-inference framework that recovers subgroup voting behavior from aggregate election returns under the three conditions that defeat existing tools simultaneously: partisan polarization, cross-cutting cleavages, and survey nonresponse. The framework is validated through large-scale simulation experiments and benchmarked against statewide voter-file ground truth that reveals individual-level vote choice. Substantively, national origin rather than education organizes Hispanic vote choice, a within-race cleavage that conventional race-level ecological estimators collapse.

“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.

“Bridges Burnt: Uneven Urbanization and the Spatial Breakdown of Patronage Infrastructure in Malaysia.” [Latest Draft]

Patronage is a delivery technology that depends on geographic social closure: when communities are spatially compact and socially bounded, resources can be targeted and reciprocity enforced. Using settlement-level data from Malaysia, the paper shows that urbanization dissolved that closure settlement type by settlement type: Chinese New Villages near towns lost their social enclosure before Malay land schemes in the interior, dismantling the ruling coalition’s patronage machine decades before its formal defeat in 2018.

“Crisis from Within: Elite Defection, Intraparty Competition, and the Breakdown of Dominant Party Systems.” [Latest Draft]

When and how do dominant party systems break? The cracks they do not recover from come from within, after years of electoral dominance, led by the party’s most successful politicians rather than its marginal ones. Across 4,638 candidate-elections in Malaysia’s UMNO (1959–2018), Japan’s LDP (1958–1993), and Taiwan’s KMT (1986–2001), a monopoly over office forces losing elites to choose between marginalization and exit, producing bloc exits, when cohesive factions leave together after losing leadership struggles, and marginal exits, when weakened candidates depart alone. Whether a split actually ends the party’s dominance is downstream: breakaway parties 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 the Slope Loses, the Intercepts Gain: Measurement Error and Misattributed Effects in Fixed- and Random-Effects Models” (with Robert Franzese). [Latest Draft]

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). [Latest Draft]

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-closing shocks shaped Trump-related and extremist engagement on social media, mapping the spatial and temporal diffusion of economic-grievance discourse.