Christian Goebel

• PhD
• Professor at University of Vienna

This paper introduces a model that links ICT management to the consolidation of autocratic regimes. At its centre is the hypothesis that ICT can help both to undermine and to sustain autocratic rule. A second hypothesis is that the demise of an autocracy can be prevented, or at least delayed, if autocrats actively use ICT to enhance surveillance, a...

By the end of 2015, every second Chinese will have access to the Internet. The ability of an increasing number of Chinese people to communicate and consume online has inspired a wide array of scholarship on topics such as censorship, surveillance and the use of social media. While much of this research is premised on the notion of antagonistic stat...

In Taiwan, the legal definition of what constitutes “corrupt” behavior and legal changes is now clearer than ever. Moreover, since the change in ruling parties, judicial independence has been guaranteed and anti-corruption agencies have been strengthened considerably. Although there is still corruption and that the institutional configuration of Ta...

How accurate is media-elicited protest event data from autocracies where the state censors the media? Based on a source-specific model of event selection and a multisource dataset of over 3,100 protests from three Chinese megacities, we demonstrate the substantial advantages of using social media data, capturing 115 times more protests than English...

How good is media-elicited protest event data from autocracies, where the media are censored? Based on a source-specific model of event selection and a multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests from three Chinese mega-cities, we show that major advantages in information gathering and reporting translate into social media capturing 116-times more...

Why do Chinese governments at various levels set up public complaint websites where citizen petitions and government responses can be reviewed by the general public? We argue that it is the result of two factors: strong signals sent by the central government to improve governance, and the availability of new technologies to promote policy innovatio...

Why do China’s authorities repress some protests, but not others? By how much do crowd size, violent tactics and protest location increase the likelihood of repression? Based on a newly available dataset of more than 70,000 protest events collected from social media, this article tests three competing explanations of protest repression in China. It...

Chinas Innovationskapazität entzieht sich einer einfachen Bewertung. Während Optimisten China schon als Innovationsnation betrachten, assoziieren Pessimisten chinesische Unternehmen vor allem mit Billigprodukten und Fälschungen. Das vorliegende Kapitel soll zu einer realistischeren Einschätzung von Chinas Innovationskapazität beitragen, indem es di...

Since 2004, the central government has incentivized local officials to solve regional problems proactively and to prevent their emergence. The present contribution investigates the impact of these incentives. It analyses the geographic distribution of policy innovations in China, the types of measures local government officials devise to solve or t...

Prekäre Arbeitsverhältnisse sind ein integraler Bestandteil des chinesischen Entwicklungsmodells. Chinas im Durchschnitt zweistelliges Wirtschaftswachstum zwischen 1978 und 2010 beruht zu einem wesentlichen Bestandteil auf der systematischen Ausnutzung von Entwicklungs- und Einkommensunterschieden. Mit Ausnahme von wertvollen Analysen über Großprot...

What explains the remarkable performance of China’s One-Party authoritarian regime? In line with the general theme of this book, the present chapter examines the development of the Chinese One-Party Regime from the vantage point of legitimizing narratives (normative legitimacy) and outputs (performance legitimacy), the co-optation of social forces...

Since Taiwan became democratic in 1992 and especially after the change in ruling parties in 2000, the passage of new laws and the reform of existing ones have defined more clearly than ever what constitutes “corrupt” behavior, and legal changes have followed international norms. Moreover, since the change in ruling parties, judicial independence ha...

The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China. LUIGI TOMBA. Ithaca, NY, and London, UK: Cornell University Press, 2014 x + 225 pp. $22.95; £13.95 ISBN 978-0-8014-7935-9 - Volume 222 - Christian Göbel

Field research in China often requires the researcher to cooperate with two kinds of actors: research collaborators, such as those at universities or official think tanks, and local officials. These actors facilitate or enhance field access, but such access comes at the price of a potential “pre-selection bias” in data collection. Some scholars hav...

Corruption has been on the top of Taiwan’s political and social agenda since at least the early 1980s. In many opinion surveys over the years, people have named it the most pressing political issue. Taiwan’s democratization in 1992 did not improve the situation - some observers even argue that corruption has worsened because of the need to finance...

Social unrest is on the rise in China. Few incidents of public demonstrations, disruptive action or riots occurred in the 1980s, but the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square marked a turning point. In 1993, there were already 8,700 ‘mass incidents’ recorded. By 2005, the number had grown tenfold to 87,000. Unofficial data estimated by a resear...

The recent years have seen a proliferation of scholarship on protests and other forms of collective action in China. Important insights have been gained into how conflicts between social groups and local governments begin, which strategies and instruments protesters apply, and under which circumstances protests are likely to succeed or fail. Howeve...

This article contributes to the emerging research agenda of anti-corruption. Specifically, it enquires into the factors that are beneficial for the fight against corruption by comparing corruption and anti-corruption in the Republic of China on Taiwan (henceforth: Taiwan) and South Korea (henceforth: Korea). These countries not only display conside...

Trotz des offensichtlichen (wenn auch unklaren) Zusammenhangs zwischen Wirtschaftswachstum und der Persistenz autokratischer Regime wurde bisher kaum untersucht, wie sich Innovationsprozesse auf die Stabilität autokratischer Regime auswirken – und umgekehrt. Dieser Beitrag widmet sich dieser Frage, indem er Literatur zu autoritärer Konsolidierung m...

Why are some Asian countries successful in increasing their GDP, raising their populations’ living standards, protecting the environment, and establishing a high-quality democracy? Why are other countries in the same region mired in underdevelopment; with their population suffering from abject poverty, repression, and environmental destruction? Is...

The main purpose of this study is to shed light on the nature of social unrest in China, the grievances that are at the heart of social unrest and the counterpolicies launched by the Chinese government and to discuss the implications for EU policy. The study is based on English- and Chinese-language sources comprising official documents, newspaper...

This chapter provides insights into the origins, process and outcomes of one of the most important rural reform policies in the history of the People’s Republic of China: the Rural Tax and Fee Reform (RTFR). Its significance is equal not only to the land reform that marked the beginning of Communist rule in China, but also the liberalization of agr...

An enyclopedia entry on semiauthoritarianism (hybrid regimes): definition, classification, existing scholarship.

This article examines the interaction of legitimation, cooptation, and repression in China’s authoritarian consolidation. It shows that the totalitarian regime under Mao Zedong was characterized by a low degree of performance and cooptation and that it had to rely on extreme repression and ideological indoctrination to stay in power. After the deat...

While research on “selective policy implementation” has provided explanations for why some policies are more likely to be implemented well than others, this contribution is concerned with the phenomenon of one and the same policy being implemented well in one locality, but not in another. From a vantage point of policy implementation instruments, i...

This article analyzes continuity and change between the two administrations’ policies to fight corruption, organized crime and vote-buying from two different perspectives: The first is a policy perspective, examining formulation, implementation and impact of the most relevant measures taken by the KMT and DPP administrations. The second in as insti...

This chapter examines the changes in the organization of rural China from a perspective of organizational telos and the authoritative narration of three major roles: the "centre", "local cadres", and "the peasants." It argues that the centre has made use of at least two very different narrative strategies to organize rural development since Reform...

Die Frage nach der Stabilität autoritärer Regime steht seit einiger Zeit im Fokus einer immer weiter ausgreifenden Forschung. Diese Beiträge vermuten die Ursachen autoritärer Stabilität zumeist in institutionellen Konfigurationen und der Art der Elitenbeziehungen, während die konkreten Strategien autoritärer Regime zur Absicherung ihrer Macht unter...

In 2004, the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) was abolished in Taiwan. The SNTV had long been seen as a major factor in the sustenance of county- and township-level clientelist networks (“local factions”). It was also associated with phenomena such as extremism, candidate-centred politics, vote-buying, clientelism and organized crime involvement...

Christian Gael, The Innovation Dilemma and the Consolidation of Autocratic Regimes, pp. 132-156. Despite the obvious (though as of yet unclear) relationship between economic growth and the persistence of autocratic regimes, there are only few studies that examine how innovation processes affect autocracies - and vice versa. Linking the scholarship...

This book aims to make sense of the recent reform of neighbourhood institutions in urban China. It builds on the observation that the late 1990s saw a comeback of the state in urban China after the increased economization of life in the 1980s had initially forced it to withdraw. Based on several months of fieldwork in locations ranging from poor an...

Steinnudeln. Ländliche Erinnerungen und staatliche Vergangenheitsbewältigung der “Großen Sprung”- Hungersnot in der chinesischen Provinz Henan (Stone Noodles: Rural and Official Memories of the Great Leap Famine in the Chinese Province Henan). WemheuerFelix. Vienna: Peter Lang, 2007. xii + 294 pp. £31.30ISBN 978-3-631-56279-6 - Volume 205 - Christi...

How does institution building during authoritarianism affect the consolidation of a young democracy? We address this question by comparing two Asian Third Wave democracies: Taiwan and Thailand. Taiwan transited to democracy in the late 1980s and has since then undergone a process of steady consolidation. In contrast, Thailand’s seemingly promising...

Authoritarian consolidation is conceptualised as a deliberate state project to improve a regime’s capabilities for governing society. It is hypothesised that the durability of an authoritarian regime increases to the extent that regime elites manage to substitute coercion for governing by organisation, regulation and the management of discourses. T...

Based on a treasure trove of information collected through fieldwork interviews and painstaking documentary research through the Chinese and Western language presses, this book analyzes one of the most important reforms implemented in China over the past decade - the rural tax and fee reform, also known as the "Third Revolution in the Countryside"....

This paper focuses on the distributive effects of the Rural Tax and Fee Reform on county-level aggregate peasant burden, peasant income, and government finances in China’s Anhui Province. It seeks to answer the question of whether the reform has changed the structural determinants of peasant per capita income and government revenue. It further tack...

Cet article s’intéresse aux effets redistributifs de la réforme des taxes et prélèvements ruraux sur l’ensemble des charges acquittées et des revenus perçus par les paysans, ainsi que sur les finances du gouvernement au niveau du district (xian), dans la province de l’Anhui. Il cherche à évaluer si la réforme a changé les déterminants structurels d...

The aim of this article is to identify and compare institutional patterns of political corruption in Taiwan and Korea and to evaluate recent anti-corruption programs before this background. It adopts a historical-institutionalist approach and shows that both paths were similar in that rampant political corruption has been became a source of both pu...

Das vorliegende Kapitel untersucht das Zusammenspiel von Wahlen und Regierbarkeit in der Republik China auf Taiwan (fortan: Taiwan) und Südkorea (fortan: Korea) seit Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges. Es liefert eine historisch-genetische Analyse des wechselseitigen Zusammenhangs zwischen den Regeln des Wahlprozesses auf der einen und den politischen St...

Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage nach, ob sich in China eine Zivilgesellschaft in der Entstehung befindet. Die Autorinnen und Autoren widmen sich hierfür einer Reihe politischer und sozialer Entwicklungen und Phänomene, die auf ein sich änderndes Beziehungsgefüge zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft hindeuten. Sie untersuchen dabei (a) neue Partizi...

This article analyses the policies of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration’s policies to fight corruption, organised crime and vote-buying from two different perspectives. The first looks at policy, examining formulation, implementation and the impact of the most relevant measures taken. The other is an ins...

Der Artikel beschreibt die Erfahrungen des chinesischen Politikwissenschaftlers Li Fan im Zusammenhang mit der ersten direkten Wahl, die in der Gemeinde Buyun in der VR China abgehalten wurde. Li Fan dokumentiert die Abläufe und beurteilt die Bedeutung dieser Wahlen, die weltweit stark beachtet worden sind. Eine vorangestellte kurze Einleitung von...

Cet article analyse les politiques mises en œuvre par les administrations du Kuomintang (KMT), puis du Parti démocrate progressiste (PDP) pour combattre la corruption, le crime organisé et l’achat de votes, sous deux perspectives différentes. La première, politique, examine la formulation, l’application et l’impact des mesures les plus significativ...

Institutionalization plays an important role in democratic consolidation. This paper goes beyond constitutional reforms and takes a closer look at the institutions, both informal and formal, that have shaped and influenced Taiwan's political process since its successful democratic transition. It seeks to elucidate in a systematic way the role major...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Despite the obvious (though as of yet unclear) relationship between economic growth and the persistence of autocratic regimes, there are only few studies that examine how innovation processes affect autocracies – and vice versa. Linking the scholarship on authoritarian consolidation with insights from the National Innovation Systems- and Science an...

Applying a historical institutionalist perspective, this paper examines the genesis, implementation process and impact of the recent Rural Tax and Fee Reform (RTFR) in China. It is posited that the RTFR represents a serious, although inconsistent, attempt to shift the balance of central-local relations toward the centre via stricter regulation of c...