Research

PUBLICATIONS

Pizzi, Elise and Wenfang Tang. "Political Action by Ethnic Minorities in China." Accepted at Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

How does ethnic identity affect political action in nondemocratic countries? While protest is often used to express dissatisfaction and demand government response in China, the risks associated with public demonstrations are higher for minority groups. In addition, government institutions are designed to be more responsive to minority needs. To explore the channels of state engagement for different ethnic groups, we draw on a new dataset of the preferred political activities among 8,000 individuals in China, including more than 1,500 ethnic minorities. Overall, we find that minorities are more likely than Han to prefer resolving issues through government institutions. In addition, Uyghurs and Tibetans are very unlikely to protest or to take no action when faced with a problem. Our results demonstrate that ethnic minorities choose less confrontational and more institutionalized methods for political activity than the Han majority.

Elise Pizzi and Hu Yue. "How Does Government Policy Shape Migration Decisions? The Case of China's Hukou System." Accepted at Modern China.

In the last 30 years, migration and urbanization have transformed China. Chinese cities use the household registration (‘hukou’) to adjust the barriers to gaining local status and access to public service benefits in an effort to shape migration patterns. To what extent do hukou policies shape decisions about migration destinations? We draw on a nationally representative survey of migrants and an original survey experiment to test the effect of hukou barriers and benefits on the relative appeal of different destination cities. We find that strict limits on local hukou status do not deter labor migrants. However, local hukou status is important for migrants because of the public benefits it confers. When migrants can gain access to public services without changing their hukou status, cities boost their appeal. These findings demonstrate that hukou policy has real impact on migration patterns and on access to public benefits for millions of Chinese.

Hu Yue and Elise Pizzi. "Breaking through the Linguistic Barrier: A Study of Government Policy and Barriers to Migration." Accepted at China: An International Journal.

Why do migrants choose some destinations over others? This study explores the influence of language on migrant preferences. We argue that migrants prefer to move to regions where the difference in vernacular languages is smaller because of both communicative and cultural considerations. Governments can use language policies to help migrants cross over the language barrier for communication but not culturally. We examined these arguments with survey experiments and econometric analyses of national representative data of China. The empirical evidence supports our arguments even after controlling for the economic and institutional motivations, and uncovers the non-linear effect of proficiency in the language promoted by government policy. The findings have far-reaching implications of understanding the migration decision-making process and the role of language policy in shaping national integration and population dynamics.

Pizzi, Elise. 2021. "Labor Migration and Rural Development in China." in The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies. Chris Shei and Weixiao Wei, eds.

Pizzi, Elise. 2020. "Ethnicity and Government Provision of Drinking Water Infrastructure in Rural China." Asian Survey.

What areas does the Chinese government prioritize for building new drinking water provision infrastructure? Chinese policy favors ethnic minorities and minority autonomous regions due to concerns about inequality and potential instability. However, the implementation of policy does not always reflect the pro-minority government policies. Drawing on a new dataset of more than 10,000 drinking water projects in rural Guizhou Province, I explore how ethnicity and autonomy influence the implementation of public goods provision policy in an authoritarian context. I argue that drinking water facilities are more likely to be built in majority Han areas because implementation and project completion is easier for officials. This study finds that the Chinese government provides drinking water infrastructure at a higher rate to areas where the minority population is smaller. This result indicates that implementation concerns trump policy design when it comes to drinking water infrastructure. The findings have implications for ethnic politics and public goods provision and for the implementation of policy in non-democratic contexts. In addition, these findings demonstrate why regions with larger minority populations are often slower to develop and improve access to basic public services.

Mitchell, Sara and Elise Pizzi. 2020. "Natural Disasters, Forced Migration, and Civil Conflict: The Importance of Government Policy Responses." International Studies Review.

Understanding the connections between environmental change, migration, and conflict is urgent as natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity. Migration is one response to these environmental changes. Existing literature suggests that this environmental migration can cause violent conflict as migrants lose livelihoods, move to new areas, or compete over scarce resources. However, the path through which migration leads to conflict—and the policy responses that either fuel conflict or promote stability—are not well understood. Some countries develop adequate proactive (e.g. infrastructure) and reactive post-disaster (e.g. reconstruction) policies to mitigate grievances and conflict risks from forced migration. Other countries fail to respond adequately to disasters, opening the door for insurgent groups to garner support. We argue that we must collect better data on government policies related to relocation programs, restrictions on movement, and post-disaster reconstruction to identify trigger situations where disasters and migration are most likely to produce violence.

Burch, Michael and Elise Pizzi. 2020. "Strategic Targeting: The Islamic State and Use of Violence in Iraq and Syria." Terrorism and Political Violence.

What explains the specific location of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq? We consider previous arguments that emphasize either ethnic or economic endowments shape a group’s use of violence throughout conflict. We explore these competing motivations using a spatial analysis of the Islamic State’s individual acts of violence from 2011-2017. We find that both areas with ethnic heterogeneity and valuable economic rents are associated with more individual Islamic State violent events. By examining the micro-foundations of the Islamic State’s conflict decisions, we provide further nuance to understanding the strategic logic of rebel groups during wartime.

Jami Nunez and Elise Pizzi. 2018. “Governance and Water Progress for the Rural Poor.” Global Governance. [online]

Why do some countries see improvements in access to water for the rural poor while others do not? Even for countries that met the Millennium Development Goals of halving those without water access, the progress accrued largely in urban areas and to the rich. We explore the role that various aspects of governance quality play in extending drinking water access to rural areas, particularly to the very poorest. We draw on a dataset complied from data on governance quality and newly available data on access to water by wealth quintiles to explore change in drinking water access across countries. We find that rural governance quality is far more important for extending water access to the rural poor than it is for the rich. In particular, countries with greater capacity to design and implement policy improve water access rates for the poor more quickly than those with weaker governance, but democracy and voice and accountability do not affect water access for the rural poor or the rich. Our work extends the research on water progress to consider the factors that drive inequities between the rich and the poor and ties into the larger research agenda on the distributive effects of governance in development outcomes.

L. Dilling, E. Pizzi, J. Berggren, A. Ravikumar, K. Andersson. 2017. "Drivers of Adaptation: Responses to weather- and climate-related hazards in 60 local governments in the Intermountain Western U.S." Environment and Planning A. [online]

Cities are key sites of action for adaptation to climate change. However, there are a wide variety of responses to hazards at the municipal level. Why do communities take adaptive action in the face of weather- and climate-related risk? We study what cities are doing in response to existing natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, and blizzards as an analog for understanding the drivers of adaptive behavior toward climate change risks. We conducted a survey of 60 U.S. municipalities and 6 in-depth case studies in the intermountain west states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah that regularly experience weather and climate extreme events. Our analysis shows that perception of risk and external drivers such as planning requirements or availability of funding stand out as important drivers, although a combination of factors is likely important for taking action. Other important factors include the presence of a policy champion, perceived vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events, and previous experience with a range of types of extreme events. Overall, our results suggest that multiple factors interact or act in combination to produce an enabling environment for action in the face of weather- and climate-related risk.

Pizzi, Elise. 2017. “Does Labor Migration Improve Access to Public Goods in Source Communities? Evidence from Rural China.” Journal of Chinese Political Science. [online]

What is the effect of out-migration on drinking water provision in rural China? Despite concerns about the ability of migrants to contribute to collective action for public goods provision, this study demonstrates that villages with higher rates of labor migration are more likely to have public drinking water than those with little migration. Temporary labor migration reduces isolation and increases the connections outside the village. Funding organizations favor villages where they have contacts as well as villages that they perceive as in need of support because most working-age adults are working outside the village. As a result, villages with high rates of out-migration are more likely have public access to drinking water. The findings are based on data from a survey of more than 50 natural villages in two townships of Southwest China.

Liu, Amy and Elise Pizzi. 2016. “The Language of Economic Growth: A New Measure of Linguistic Heterogeneity.” British Journal of Political Science. [link]

Conventional wisdom holds that languages, as ethnic markers, build communities with shared preferences and strong social networks. Consequently, ethnolinguistic homogeneity can facilitate growth. This article challenges this conception of language as a cultural marker. It argues that language is also a practical vehicle of communication; people can be multilingual, and second languages can be learned. Hence language boundaries are neither (1) congruent with ethnic boundaries nor (2) static. If true, the purported advantages of ethnolinguistic homogeneity should also be evident in countries with large populations of non-native speakers conversant in official languages. The study tests this hypothesis using an original cross-national and time-variant measure that captures both mother-tongue speakers and second-language learners. The empirical results are consistent with the understanding of language as an efficiency-enhancing instrument: countries with exogenously high levels of heterogeneity can avoid the ‘growth tragedy’ (Easterly and Levine 1997) by endogenously teaching the official language in schools.

Burch, Michael, and Elise Pizzi. 2014. "Local Fights in National Conflicts: Understanding the Location of Conflict Events during Intrastate Conflict." Civil Wars. 16(1): 24-45. [PDF]

How do rebel groups determine their targets during intrastate conflict? We build upon two competing theories in conflict studies that emphasize either the social or economic determinants of violence during war and use geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to explore these competing theories. To do this, we utilize a subnational analysis of the most likely case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to understand whether ethnicity or natural resources motivates the location of conflict events. Accounting for geography, we find that economic endowments in the form of natural resources are highly related with the number of violent attacks, while the presence of competing ethnic groups does not offer much help in understanding the location of conflict events.

WORKING PAPERS

Yao, Jielu, Yuehong Tai, and Elise Pizzi. “Variations in Government Responsiveness: Policy Innovation and Diffusion during the COVID-19 Crisis.” Presented at Association of Chinese Political Studies, 2020.

Crises illuminate variations in government policy innovation, responsiveness, and capacity. In the face of a public health crisis, subnational governments are particularly important in addressing local challenges and can act quickly to respond while the central government faces more logistical and political constraints. Still, provincial governments in China vary widely in their choices of policy, communication strategy, and ability to respond. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, what explains the variation in provincial policy content and timing? We argue that the local context is critical for understanding variation in policy adoptions. To test why some province were more proactive and adopted policies earlier than others, we collected data on the adoption of eighteen policies used to contain COVID-19 in all 33 provinces in China from December 30th, 2019 to March 18th, 2020. We use event history analyses to predict the probability of adopting each policy. Our results demonstrate that policies adopted during public health crises are often the result of local characteristics and local politics rather than top-down leadership. More specifically, we find that the severity of the regional outbreak and the leadership experience of top provincial officials are the most reliable predictors of policy adoption. The findings help explain variation in government responsiveness to health crises and highlight the critical role of local officials in crisis response, even in a largely top-down system.

"Preparing for the Unknown: Assessing factors that impact community disaster preparedness and communication." with Kylah Hedding, Kajsa Dalrymple, and Sam Harper.

As natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, local governments play a crucial role in responding, reducing risk, minimizing damage, and hastening recovery. Why are some communities better able to respond and recover from disasters than others? The quality of local government preparation and communication and the inclusiveness of planning and preparation are critical components to effective disaster response and recovery. But formal plans and real time actions do not always align. We assess government preparation and experience in emergency response and communication across seven counties in Iowa. In each county, we conduct interviews with officials, journalists, and other stakeholders to evaluate the content, comprehensiveness, and appropriateness of local disaster response and communication strategies - both formal and informal. While all counties in our study may have disaster response plans in place, officials acknowledge that planning only goes so far -- effective response requires in the moment innovation. We find that the breadth and depth of networks among local, state, and regional officials - both formal and informal - are critical components of the informal plans for disaster response. In addition, community characteristics shape local vulnerabilities but are not always reflected in formal plans. The presence of language barriers, transient or newly settled populations, and specific industries change the community networks needed to effectively respond and communicate during a severe weather event, but only some counties incorporate these into their planning. Our findings highlight the need to address specific community characteristics in both formal and informal disaster response and communication plans.