Ongoing Research Projects
Book Project
The Modern Regency:
A New Theory of Leadership Transition and Regime Resilience in Communist Dictatorships
Extant literature has shown the importance of routinized leadership succession for authoritarian resilience. However, the factors leading to orderly power transitions in autocracies are unclear. Is there a durable path of leadership transition in authoritarian regimes that have been overlooked by the field of political science? What mechanisms help non-electoral dictatorships overcome the political turbulence of leadership transitions? How do entrenched methods of power succession buttress authoritarian resilience? Relying upon extensive qualitative comparative studies and process-tracing of trajectories of regime institutionalization in 15 single-party communist regimes in the post-strongman era, the author explores the astonishing resilience of five remaining socialist party-states and the causes of the collapse of the other ten.
Publications
The Modern Regency: Leadership Transition and Authoritarian Resilience of the Former Soviet Union and China (with Jiangnan Zhu). Communist and Post-Communist Studies, June 2021; 54 (1-2): 24–44. https://doi.org/10.1525/j.postcomstud.2021.54.1-2.24
Journal article (in Russian): The Exploration of “Singapore Model” in the PRC under Xi Jinping, The Far Eastern Affairs, N2, 2017. (Peer-reviewed journal published by the Russian Academy of Sciences).
Working Papers
“Do Communist Parties Suffer from the Iron Law of Oligarchy? A Century of Electoral Evidence from China and the Soviet Union (with Huangfu Wenqing and Dr. Li Tao).” Under review. Presented at MPSA'21
Michels famously argued in 1911 that European socialist parties suffered from the iron law of oligarchy. Did Michels’ law also apply to communist parties of the 20th century? We study the question using novel party congress election data from the Chinese Communist Party (1945-2017) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1934-1986), the latter of which exported the party congress institutions to China. We find that nay votes against leader-nominated candidates were initially vibrant but eventually collapsed in both parties, with the process being more prolonged in China. We provide suggestive evidence that the level of party congress nay votes is correlated with the vibrancy of intraparty democracy in both countries. We cautiously conclude that Michels’ law applies to these two communist parties. Our findings cast doubt on the influential party-sustaining-autocracy thesis in comparative politics and shed light on the political trajectory of China.
"Institutionalization of the Revolution: Leadership Succession and Single-Party Resilience in the 21st Century." Under Review. Presented at MPSA'21, APSA'21.
While many researchers attribute the striking durability of single-party regimes to strong party institutions, it is often unclear which institutions provide this resilience and how. Moreover, single-party regimes are often treated homogeneously, which leads to an insufficient understanding of the party institutions. This paper presents the comparative process-tracing of leadership succession politics in the four surviving communist regimes of Laos, Vietnam, the DPRK, and Cuba. The study shows that the problem of supreme executive power transition in communist regimes is likely to be resolved non-violently under the arrangement of the modern regency when there is an informal third-party actor invested in the outcome of the transition. This study proposes a solution to one of the crucial problems in dictatorial power sharing: the lack of a third-party authority.
"Sons of Revolution: Nepotism as a Source of Authoritarian Resilience in Communist China, Vietnam, and Laos." Under Review. Presented at MPSA'23.
Single-party institutions sustain authoritarian resilience, but it is unclear how some previously effective institutions cease to be so, leading analogous dictatorships to contrast survival outcomes. The causal mechanism of party institutions’ role in the single-party regimes’ resilience has not been clarified. The article shows how nepotism in the supreme leadership sustains institutional resilience and institutional norms adopted at critical junctures. Based on historical institutional analysis of the novel biographical data on leadership succession in China, Vietnam, and Laos, I argue that elite nepotism became a means of institutional reproduction in communist regimes.
Archival Research
1/2019, 6/2019, 10/2019, 9/2020 - Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Moscow, Russia
Result: An original dataset on the voting to the Central Committee at the National Congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The paper based on these data is currently under review.