Yingjie Fan, Princeton University 

How do individuals living in authoritarian regimes engage in political participation? Beyond dissenting and acting as if, citizens patriotically demonstrate support for authoritarian rulings both symbolically and behaviorally. However, the extent to which nationalism is potent enough to habituate people into engaging in everyday nationalistic consumption remains under-explored, along with its potential political and economic consequences. Therefore, I utilized high-frequency online sales records and social media posts in the event of Xinjiang Cotton Controversy to examine the durability, temporality, and reversibility of bottom-up economic nationalism among Chinese consumers. The sale records reveal that consumers respond to nationalistic impulses immediately, with boycotts of anti-China brands causing sharp declines in sales. Interestingly, such nationalistic boycotts tend to outlast public outrage over anti-China practices but remain relatively short-lived, varying significantly across brands and depending on media exposure. This collective nature of nationalistic consumption reveals the existence of a voluntary yet potent “soft sanction” within the authoritarian ruler’s toolkit. It enables authoritarian regimes to induce voluntary boycotts and leverage economic purchasing power to punish corporations with opposing ideological alignments. 

Valeria Lauria, European University Institute 

Over the past few decades, China has emerged as Africa’s predominant partner in infrastructure development, effectively meeting the continent’s infrastructure needs while enhancing its global economic position. Concurrently, other significant global players such as the US and EU have intensified their engagement, signaling a shift towards a multipolar approach in Africa’s infrastructure efforts. This article provides a comparative analysis of the financing strategies employed by China and the EU in Africa, particularly through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Global Gateway (GG). Through detailed document analysis and in-depth interviews, this study highlights a pattern of ‘adaptive convergence’ where Western and Chinese development finance actors increasingly emulate each other’s strategies, and it illustrates how competition between these entities is transforming lending norms and practices. The emulation encompasses financing sectors, drivers, lending practices, alignment with international standards on environmental and social governance and engagement with local political actors. The paper also underscores the pivotal role of African agency, demonstrating that African states and regional actors are actively shaping the terms of engagement to better align with their domestic interests and development priorities. 

Keyi Tang, ESADE Business School; Min Ye, Boston University; Sarah Sklar, Boston University 

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has faced environmental criticism, leading to the launch of the Green Belt and Road Initiative (GBRI) in 2017. This study explores whether China’s green investments are commercially or geopolitically driven, addressing the debate between “greenwashing” claims and genuine shifts towards sustainability. Using a novel database of all Chinese-financed global plants from 2000 to 2023, we employ two-way fixed effects and instrumental variable approaches. We find that the GBRI has significantly increased China’s green energy investments, particularly in geopolitically aligned countries, even after controlling for economic factors. This effect is not observed in U.S.-allied nations. Our findings suggest that the GBRI is not merely greenwashing, highlighting the role of geopolitical factors in shaping China’s global renewable energy investments.  

Hong Zhang, Indiana University Bloomington; Yuan Wang, Duke Kunshan University 

How does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consolidate its presence in state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) overseas operations, and how do employees in these projects respond to such top-down initiatives? While extensive literature has examined the CCP’s role in Chinese SOEs—focusing on its efforts to maintain control over increasingly powerful businesses and its contribution to corporate governance—its functions in overseas SOEs remain underexplored. This paper attempts to fill that gap with innovative evidence. We argue that the CCP consolidates its presence in SOEs’ overseas projects by integrating party-building activities with essential on-site needs, including employee benefits, human resources support, and disciplinary oversight. Grassroots Party members view these activities as additional resources that they can legitimately leverage. Importantly, these overseas party-building efforts are internally oriented, aiming to reconnect overseas members with China’s system rather than pursue external infiltration. Empirical data were collected through one-month participatory observation in a Chinese construction SOE in Ethiopia in August 2024, along with observations gleaned from multi-year fieldwork in Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Angola, Pakistan, and Beijing on Chinese SOEs’ overseas operations. These primary data were triangulated with online ethnography of social media accounts managed by Party organizations in SOEs, as well as policy and media documents. This study represents one of the first attempts to understand the CCP’s role in overseas SOEs by detailing grassroots party-building activities, their rationale, and their functions. Drawing on original ethnographic work and interviews conducted over the years, this research contributes to the emerging call in Chinese political economy to “bring the Party back in” and explores the daily realities of “party-state capitalism” beyond China. 

Yuan Zhou, Kobe University; Tetsuro Kobayashi, Waseda University; Lungta Seki, Koç University  

Bo Feng, Boston University 

Policymakers face a trade-off between using rules to monitor agents and delegating discretion to them for carrying out policies. Rules impose specific constraints but require policymakers to draft detailed regulations, while delegation entails lower drafting costs but risks abuse of discretion by agents to their own advantages. This trade-off is more pronounced when institutions of bureaucratic oversight are weak. Using an original dataset of 319,000 Chinese local regulatory documents from 2010 to 2022, each highlighting one government policy task, I apply natural language processing to analyze their rule-making details. Empirical results show that higher-level policymakers’ choice between rules and discretion depends on task-specific costs of drafting contingency-based rules — conditions agents may encounter, and actions required to address them. For policy tasks with higher drafting costs, policymakers are more likely to delegate to lower-level agents discretion over task procedures or set targets of task outputs for ex post oversight. 

Forbearance or Control: Dual Impact of State Ownership on Business Compliance 
Shengqiao Lin, Harvard University; Xuan Wang, National School of Development, Peking University; Jiayi Hou, Peking University 

How does state ownership influence business regulatory compliance? Existing studies offer two contrasting predictions: state-affiliated firms may exploit regulatory forbearance to prioritize profit over compliance, while they may also exhibit greater adherence to regulations due to government intervention in decision-making. 

We argue that these two effects coexist and depend on the strength of the connection: strong connections result in greater government control over corporate decisions, leading to higher compliance with regulatory demands. In contrast, weak connections allow firms to benefit from state protection while avoiding interference, thus emboldening them to disregard rules. 

Empirically, we test this argument using the case of China’s Cybersecurity Law, enacted in 2016, to examine whether firms with varying degrees of state ownership improved their user data protection in response to regulatory requirements. We draw on two original and comprehensive datasets. First, we use data from third-party auditing platforms to assess the security performance of each historical version of mobile apps among the top 5% most downloaded in China, providing app-month-level information on security vulnerabilities and privacy violations. Second, we utilize China’s Business Registration Database to conduct equity tracing, quantifying the proportion of state capital invested in each app developer, both directly and indirectly. 

Difference-in-differences analyses reveal a U-shaped relationship between state ownership and compliance following the enactment of the Cybersecurity Law. Compared to purely private firms, companies with high state ownership quickly adjusted to the new regulations, reducing security vulnerabilities in their apps, limiting user data access and permission requests, and curbing sensitive behaviors. In contrast, firms with limited state ownership exhibited even lower compliance levels than fully private firms. Using variations in direct and indirect state investment, we find that these results reflect both firms’ proactive compliance and the state’s top-down control. 

This study extends our understanding of China’s state-business relations, demonstrating that the key issue is not merely whether a business and the state are connected but how they are connected. It also sheds light on how the penetration of China’s state capital into the private sector influences governance outcomes, contributing to broader debates on China’s party-state capitalism.  

Renhao Ye, School of Government, Peking University 

How is state capacity transmitted from the central government to localities? Although scholars have explored various aspects of state-building at the central level, a strong central government alone does not guarantee the success of a state, and few studies have examined how central state capacity is extended to subnational levels. This study explores the sources of subnational state capacity in government-invested infrastructure projects. Using an original county-level dataset that contains over 3,400 hydropower stations constructed between 1953 and 2020 in contemporary China, the findings indicate that the construction of hydropower stations likely strengthens the capacity of penetration and extraction at the county-level. This pattern remains robust through several tests and an instrumental variable approach leveraging topographic variations. A further within-case study suggests that infrastructure projects require establishing grassroots administrative authorities to comprehend and govern the local society and increasing taxation to support construction logistics. Once completed, these ad hoc institutions remain as lasting structures that enhance penetrative and extractive capacity at the county level. These findings highlight how central state capacity is transmitted to subnational levels through infrastructure constructions, offering comparative insights for promoting local political and economic development in developing countries. 

Xiaohong Yu, Tsinghua University; Zhihao Xu, Tsinghua University; Zhaoyang Sun, Tsinghua University 

This study examines how revolutionary processes influence deeply embedded social norms by analyzing gender disparities in Chinese judicial decision-making. Following Skocpol’s (1979, p. 4) definition of social revolutions as “”rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures accompanied by class-based revolts from below,”” we investigate how the Chinese Communist Revolution, characterized by intensive ideological transformation and mass mobilization, interacted with traditional gender norms. While modernization theory suggests gradual social and economic development leads to norm evolution, and revolutionary theory emphasizes rapid institutional change, the resilience of traditional norms under revolutionary pressure remains underexplored. This is particularly significant in the Chinese context, where the Communist Revolution explicitly targeted traditional gender relations through systematic propaganda, institutional reforms, and social discipline. 

We propose two competing hypotheses about revolutionary impacts on social norms: the destruction hypothesis suggests that revolutionary disruption weakens traditional norms, while the construction hypothesis posits that revolutionary institution-building strengthens new egalitarian norms. By analyzing over 2.5 million criminal cases adjudicated in Chinese courts between 2014-2020, we find that: (1) female defendants receive significantly shorter sentences than male defendants in gender-related cases; (2) this disparity is more pronounced in regions with stronger traditional Confucian influence; (3) the disruptive forces, measured by factors such as warfare or conflict, weaken the sentencing disparities driven by gender norms, while the constructive forces, reflected in the presence of women’s schools, women’s organizations, and regulations promoting women’s rights, have the opposite effect. These findings reveal the complex interaction between revolutionary forces and persistent social norms, contributing to our understanding of how radical social transformation efforts encounter deeply rooted cultural practices.  

Adam Yao Liu, National University of Singapore; Tong Liu, National University of Singapore 

We show traditional belief-induced political favouritism and miscoordination in China. Specifically, in an as-if random assignment setting, we find that provincial leaders tend to allocate more resources to cities governed by subordinates with “predestined” birth compatibility, boosting their cities’ growth. We also find that birth incompatibility between city party secretaries and mayors creates potential leadership failure, leading to worse economic outcomes. We buttress these findings with historical archives and contemporary field observations. This paper contributes to a growing literature on the political economy of traditional beliefs, and points to a novel way of studying Chinese political economy—in fact, any political economy with deep cultural foundations. 

Yinxuan Wang, New York University; Erik H. Wang, New York University 

This paper explores the intersectionality of ethnonationalism and gender in the context of ethnic conflict and foreign conquest, which are powerful forces that shape social structures and political behavior. We argue that conquests by another ethnic group can prompt the conquered, unable to resist militarily, to emphasize the cultural distinctiveness of their identity as a form of self-affirmation or resistance. The elevation and reinforcement of traditional practices, as a form of resistance to the Manchus, could lead to further degradation of women’s status by entrenching gender norms within traditional cultural practices that placed women in subordinate roles. We test this theory by exploring the military conquest of China in the 17th century by the Manchus, a minority ethnic group that ended the Chinese Ming Dynasty. 

Specifically, we study how the Manchu’s military activities reshaped gender norms. We compile a unique dataset of Manchu military campaigns, including large-scale massacres, forced submission, and other forms of violence at the county level. To measure women’s status and gender norms, we extract over 43,000 records of chaste martyrs from historical texts, analyze poetry with content about women, and study women-authored poems using conventional natural language processing techniques and large language model-based methods. Additionally, we incorporate contemporary demographic data on sex ratio at birth from Chinese population censuses to trace the long-term legacy of the conquest for gender imbalances. We also construct measures of contemporary gender attitudes from large corpora of social media text. Our identification strategies include a difference-in-differences design exploiting variations in the timing and intensity of the conquest across localities and a geographic regression discontinuity design leveraging variations in military activities, such as pauses in campaigns and negotiated surrenders. 

Our findings reveal that exposure to Manchu military activities led to a significant decline in women’s status, as evidenced by a marked rise in the number of chaste martyrs recorded. This increase reflects heightened social expectations for women to conform to the Confucian ideals of virtue and chastity. This change relates to the Chinese population’s cultural response to the conquest, with gender norms emerging as an important means of asserting ethnic identity and cultural distinctiveness in opposition to the Manchus. We also examine the persistence of this negative effect on women’s status by analyzing contemporary demographic and attitudinal patterns. The Manchu conquest and the Chinese reaction to what was seen as the humiliation of foreign rule cast a long shadow over the status of women. 

These findings contribute to broader discussions on the intersections of ethnic identity, gender norms, and the long-term legacies of violence. They highlight how the assertion of ethnic identity through cultural resistance to military conquest could lead to further degradation of women.  

Zhenhuan Lei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Joy Chen, Renmin University of China; Xiuyu Li, New York University 

Smooth leadership succession is essential for regime stability. One grave challenge to the succession problem is the absence of an adult heir who can rule the state. In such cases, a regency arrangement is often implemented, where a minor is designated as the ruler, and a regent governs in the ruler’s name. This arrangement, common in both historical and contemporary regimes, involves a two-sided commitment problem: the regent(s) cannot credibly commit to preserving the minor ruler’s authority, while the young ruler cannot commit to keeping the regent(s) safe once he is in power. This paper argues that regency by the empress dowager—typically the mother or grandmother of the child emperor—mitigates this problem in a unique way. In imperial China, where cultural norms barred women from assuming the official title of head of state, the empress dowager’s incentives were more closely aligned with the interests of the young emperor than with those of other political contenders, such as powerful ministers. Using original data on over one hundred child emperors in imperial China, we test this hypothesis and find that female regency is associated with greater political stability. Specifically, child emperors were less likely to be deposed and more likely to assume personal rule, when the empress dowager served as regent. These findings are reinforced by an instrumental variable analysis exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in the availability of female candidates for regency.  

Cheng Cheng, New York University; Daniel Mattingly, Yale University 

How do autocrats control the bureaucracies they govern? We argue that autocrats face a fundamental tradeoff when allowing bureaucrats to form strong networks. On one hand, strong networks enhance the officials’ ability to maintain order; on the other, they pose a threat to the ruler by concentrating power outside the leader’s control. To demonstrate this, we leverage an original dataset of 26,000 pieces of correspondence personally reviewed by the Yongzheng Emperor of Qing China over a thirteen-year period, written in both Manchu and Mandarin. These records offer an unusually fine-grained view of the emperor’s efforts to consolidate imperial control over the bureaucracy. Combining this with data on bureaucratic appointments in central and provincial government positions, as well as biographical data, we identify networks between bureaucrats based on shared work experience and marriage ties. We find that the emperor systematically purged officials when their networks extended beyond a single sector—such as the military, civilian, or royal household departments—suggesting that these multi-sector networks were perceived as potential threats. Our findings contribute to a broader understanding of how authoritarian rulers manage bureaucratic elites by strategically eliminating alternative centers of power. 

Linchuan Zhang, Emory University 

Why do some officers in authoritarian militaries loyally fight for the regime while others exhibit disloyalty? Focusing on officers’ military careers, I propose a theoretical framework that addresses an underappreciated factor in officers’ decision-making regarding loyalty or disloyalty: their positions within the military hierarchy. Officers holding important positions, such as commanders of core combat units, are more likely to remain loyal to the regime due to the existing resources and benefits associated with their critical roles, as well as the significant risks of marginalization if they defect to the opposition or resign from the military. Moreover, the effect of position on loyalty is conditional on faction affiliation: insiders, whose loyalty comes more from personal ties with the regime leader, are less influenced by position assignments, while military officers who are outsiders to the leader’s inner circle will be more motivated to remain loyal when assigned key positions. Consequently, offering critical positions can be a useful mechanism for regime leaders to manage loyalty, beyond well-studied other factors like officers’ personal ties and competence. Empirically, I study the case of Kuomintang (KMT) military elites during the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949) and establish an original dataset containing detailed information on over 800 KMT generals. Statistical results show that general-level KMT officers assigned to commander positions at the outbreak of the war were about 48% less likely to defect from the regime leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, after controlling for military career characteristics and demographic backgrounds. Furthermore, the influence of assigning key positions on officers’ loyalty varied across their faction affiliation: insiders maintained a relatively high level of loyalty regardless of the positions they held, while outsiders were substantively more loyal when being assigned commander positions. This study highlights the importance of position assignments in shaping military loyalty, an aspect relatively overlooked by existing studies on civil-military relations. Furthermore, by disaggregating the military into individuals instead of considering it as a unitary actor, this study sheds light on how individual officers’ decision-making on the battlefield collectively shapes the course of armed conflicts and their resolution.  

Shuyi Yu, University of Chicago 

Europe and China followed divergent paths of development during the premodern period. Europe nurtured representative institutions and secure property rights that facilitated the rise of modern capitalism, whereas the growth of commercial interests in China was persistently stifled. The divergence can be attributed, at least in part, to the more centralized power structure of the Chinese state at the dawn of the premodern era. To account for this distinction, I propose that China’s early adoption of the political philosophy of the Mandate of Heaven, inadvertently contributed to the steady trend of power centralization towards the emperor. In substantiating this argument, I develop a game-theoretical model of authoritarian power sharing, demonstrating how the threat of peasant revolution can alter the power distribution in favor of the emperor. I also present historical narratives to corroborate this finding. 

Li Shao, Zhejiang University; Juan Du, East China Normal University; Rongbin Han, University of Georgia; Dongshu Liu, City University of Hong Kong 

Conventional wisdom suggests that civic engagement fosters trust and cooperation. This implies that immigrants can gain the native’s support through active participation in social and political affairs. However, in autocracies where engagement is constrained and guided by the regime, the effects are less clear. We propose that citizens in autocracies may interpret immigrants’ civic engagement as a demonstration of citizenry spirit, window dressing, or regime co-optation effort. Using two pre-registered experiments in China, we find that the latter two forms of interpretation dominate the results. Despite of government advocacy, immigrants’ civic engagement erodes, rather than boosts, public support for immigration. Identity concerns reflected by racial bias and threats over competition for regime resources explain the mechanism. These findings reflect that the native does not favor immigrants’ civic engagement when they interpret government-controlled civic engagement as a system to distribute spoils. It contributes to the literature on both immigration attitude and civic engagement in autocracies.  

Jessica C. Teets, Middlebury College; Diana Fu, University of Toronto 

Do youth who were raised and educated in authoritarian states become socialized to embrace democratic values of social equality, pluralism, and primacy of political rights (de Tocqueville 1835; Almond and Verba 1963; Putnam 1993)? Or do they retain or even deepen their commitments to authoritarian values and norms, such as social hierarchy, anti-pluralism, and the primacy of subsistence rights over political rights (Fei 1992; Perry 2008)? Recent research (Afield, Gerring et al 2024) finds that college education promotes more support for democratic values around the world. We study whether this socialization process works for students who have civics education in high school in China but then attend university in North America to examine potential channels of socialization. We use focus groups and surveys in two locations – the US and Canada – and find nuanced socialization with civic engagement and freedom of media/speech as the most supported values.  

Ziwen Zu, University of California, San Diego 

Public service delivery in authoritarian regimes often is characterized by biases stemming from ideological, partisan, and ethnic preferences, as well as organizational priorities, state capacity, and bureaucratic discretion. While much research has explored these drivers, the role of technocrats—apolitical professionals in fields like law, public health, and economics—remains underexamined. Unlike career bureaucrats, technocrats prioritize professionalism and often operate autonomously, especially in contexts where governments outsource services to the private sector. This autonomy, while enhancing efficiency, introduces challenges such as principal-agent issues and information asymmetry, which can conflict with bureaucratic interests. Understanding these dynamics is critical for improving public service delivery. This paper addresses these gaps through the first nationwide field experiment with Chinese legal aid lawyers working on the 12348 hotlines, a central element of China’s “rule of law” initiative. Staffed by junior lawyers employed part-time by local governments but primarily working as private practitioners, the hotline exemplifies public-private partnerships in public service delivery. The study investigates how organizational and private incentives influence the quality of legal aid and explores strategies to improve public service efficiency in an authoritarian context. In the experiment, I implemented a two-factorial design: (1) randomizing the political sensitivity levels of legal inquiries, and (2) varying the incentives provided to legal aid lawyers for delivering their services to politically sensitive inquiries. The first treatment examines whether legal professionals exhibit less sincerity when handling politically sensitive inquiries. The second treatment randomizes private and institutional incentives offered to lawyers to improve the quality of their legal services. Private incentives include pressures from bureaucratic oversight and intrinsic motivations driven by moral values and ethical principles embedded in professionalism. Institutional incentives, by contrast, align with the primary objective of the authoritarian regime in initiating the hotline: maintaining regime stability by addressing public grievances and demonstrating responsiveness. In total, a team of five professional correspondents conducted 2,200 calls to over 100 local 12348 hotlines across more than 200 cities in China. To measure treatment effects, I employed a combination of human coding and computational methods to analyze conservation audios. I further connect the experimental data with unique observational data. I also collected posts from local bar association WeChat accounts, which generally fall into three categories: (1) professional knowledge updates, (2) news about government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversight of legal professionals, such as Party directives, and (3) professional activities like networking and community-building events. These posts were analyzed to assess the degree of community bonding within professional associations and the extent of political control over legal professionals. Additionally, I utilized registration data containing the full biographies of all licensed Chinese lawyers to calculate the local Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) for the legal services market. The HHI, a measure of market concentration, reflects the relative size of firms in the industry and serves as an indicator of competition levels. This metric was used to evaluate the competitive dynamics among local lawyers. The experiment reveals that state-sponsored lawyers in China deliver lower-quality responses to politically sensitive inquiries, such as administrative litigation, labor disputes, and land issues, compared to less sensitive topics like civil disputes. These lawyers often use strategies like ambiguity, avoidance, and distraction to reflect implicit bias, impeding individuals’ efforts to seek justice. Institutional incentives within China’s authoritarian regime, designed to maintain stability and suppress collective action, discourage sincere legal assistance in sensitive cases. Conversely, private incentives, including bureaucratic oversight and professional mobilization, motivate lawyers to provide clearer and more genuine aid. Among these, professional mobilization proves to be the most effective strategy for encouraging legal technocrats to assist citizens challenging the regime. Heterogeneity analyses show that institutional incentives have stronger effects in cities with higher levels of political control over lawyers, while professional mobilization is more effective in areas with greater professional community-building activities. Additionally, increased competition in the legal services market generates positive externalities by attracting more high-quality lawyers to participate in legal aid programs. 

Manfred Elfstrom, University of British Columbia, Okanagan; Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University; Yu Yan, Beijing Normal University 

When do people from different classes support each other’s demands? Classic studies in comparative politics and sociology treat cross-class alliances as key determinants of states’ long-term political trajectories. For instance, Barrington Moore (1966) famously argues that the combination of a commercializing landed elite, and a strong bourgeoisie (and tightly circumscribed crown) yields political and economic liberalism. Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) meanwhile posits that cooperation between workers and the middle class expands welfare states. To date, however, there has been little survey research conducted on feelings of sympathy or solidarity between contemporary social groups. Even less attention has been devoted to cross-class connections in places like China that are rapidly urbanizing but lack electoral outlets for popular frustrations. This paper uses a pre-registered experiment attached to an in-person survey of 5,000-plus city-based Chinese citizens to examine the degree to which middle class urbanites (students and office employees), formally employed factory workers, and more precariously employed or self-employed workers in emerging industries like food delivery are receptive to each other’s grievances. We draw on a variety of innovative measures, such as photos of different work settings, establishing respondents’ class positions and then randomly exposing respondents to snippets of news reports about the demands made by different groups, before probing into the respondents’ sympathies for those demands and for collective action toward social change more generally. In particular, we examine whether Chinese citizens are more supportive of people they perceive to be part of their own group, people they perceive to be less fortunate than themselves, or people they perceive to be their social superiors. The results offer fresh insights into emerging blocs that may prove consequential in a country undergoing important transformations.  

Jinfeng Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST); Yongshun Cai, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) 

Popular grievances do not automatically translate into collective or even individual action, but pent-up grievances remain to be a threat to authoritarian governments that are sensitive to collective actions because these actions may escalate into disruptive ones. This study examines to what extent citizens’ grievances against state authorities may become pent-up. Based on four waves of surveys in China, we find that citizen grievances against local state authorities reduce their trust in the political system, but they may not become pent-up. Instead, citizen grievances are likely to be individualized because their grievances neither last for a long time nor diffuse in society. Individualized grievances reduce the pressure faced by the government, but it remains to be researched whether this finding is valid if citizen grievances become more common or more severe.