Research

My research examines how political institutions and networks interact with firms and other non-government organizations to fuel economic growth in China and other authoritarian contexts, and how development concurrently shapes and alters those same institutions. the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long prioritized economic development, but as growth and innovation produce firms, entrepreneurs, and concentrations of private wealth, the regime must balance development with control over entrepreneurs' new-found capacity for exit and voice. Across my work, I ask how authoritarian states manage economic elites and growing middle classes through coercion, co-optation, propaganda, and repression; how economic elites use political ties, investment, and mobility to protect their interests; and how domestic bargains over wealth and authority extend into international markets. China is my principal empirical setting, but my contributions speak to comparative authoritarianism, state-society relations, corporate governance, wealth politics, and comparative and international political economy.

I combine advanced quantitative research with Chinese-language and historically grounded qualitative evidence. My work applies quantitative causal inference methods, survey experiments, text analysis, social network analysis, and formal modeling. I have constructed original datasets of firms, political elites, trade and investment flows, and newspapers, while also drawing on interviews, archives, policy documents, company reports, and Chinese academic sources. This methodological breadth allows me to connect institutional theories to observable behavior across citizens, firms, local governments, and states. My experience conducting research for the Security and Political Economy lab at USC has also provided experience in bringing undergraduates into research, teaching quantitative skills, and furthering education through applied scholarship.

My dissertation, Develop or Punish: Autocratic Growth and Expropriation in China, asks how authoritarian leaders promote investment and innovation while preserving control over the economic elites produced by development. As production becomes more dependent on skilled labor, capital, and innovation, indiscriminate expropriation grows increasingly costly. Yet simultenously, firms acquire greater capacity for voice and exit: they can influence officials through investment decisions and political ties or move capital, production, and ownership abroad. I argue that autocrats respond by replacing broad predation with expansive co-optation and selective coercion. They protect firms important to growth while targeting threatening elites, especially during factional conflict or leadership turnover and when firms possess valuable but relatively immobile assets.

The dissertation distinguishes institutionalized rent extraction from coercive expropriation, which imposes discretionary fiscal, regulatory, or legal costs to discipline an owner or firm, and eliminative expropriation, which removes an economic actor and transfers control over assets. Empirically, I connect national political competition to local state-business relations through a novel network dataset linking Chinese cadres to the managers, directors, and owners of listed firms from the national to the municipal level. I combine these ties with firm financial and ownership data, career histories, anti-corruption investigations, and municipal economic indicators. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses examine how political embeddedness changes firms' tax burdens, bribery costs, legal exposure, and subsidies. I combine this with comparative cases of semiconductors, electric vehicles, and artificial intelligence sectors supported by qualitative primary sources and interviews to trace how the CCP calibrates coercion and protection in strategically important sectors.

Stephen Schick “Ties That Bind and When They Break: Foreign Ownership, Corruption, and Political Risk in China,” Accepted to the 2027 International Studies Association Conference.

Do foreign investors face greater political risk than domestic firms in developing economies? Existing IPE research often treats foreignness as a liability because foreign firms lack local information and political embeddedness, while domestic firms can use elite ties to secure protection. I argue that this advantage reverses when national anti-corruption campaigns disrupt local patronage networks. Domestic embeddedness reduces ordinary regulatory risk but exposes firms to shocks when patrons are purged; foreign ownership, by contrast, may reduce dependence on local political brokers and strengthen firms’ outside options when products, capital, and supply chains are internationally mobile. I test this argument in China, where local governments have long competed for FDI while access money remains central to state–business relations. Using a new firm-level dataset linking political ties among domestic firms and multinational subsidiaries to municipal official purges, I estimate staggered treatment effects with matched firm characteristics across sectors, ownership forms, and pre-treatment regulatory trajectories. The analysis assesses whether foreign ownership and political embeddedness condition firms’ exposure to legal and regulatory burdens after local anti-corruption shocks, clarifying under which conditions foreign ownership serves as a help or a hinderance to firms’ productivity.

Stephen Schick “Picking Losers: Selective Expropriation of Rival Economic Elites in China,” Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, April 2026.

Do foreign investors face greater political risk than domestic firms in developing economies? Existing IPE research often treats foreignness as a liability because foreign firms lack local information and political embeddedness, while domestic firms can use elite ties to secure protection. I argue that this advantage reverses when national anti-corruption campaigns disrupt local patronage networks. Domestic embeddedness reduces ordinary regulatory risk but exposes firms to shocks when patrons are purged; foreign ownership, by contrast, may reduce dependence on local political brokers and strengthen firms’ outside options when products, capital, and supply chains are internationally mobile. I test this argument in China, where local governments have long competed for FDI while access money remains central to state–business relations. Using a new firm-level dataset linking political ties among domestic firms and multinational subsidiaries to municipal official purges, I estimate staggered treatment effects with matched firm characteristics across sectors, ownership forms, and pre-treatment regulatory trajectories. The analysis assesses whether foreign ownership and political embeddedness condition firms’ exposure to legal and regulatory burdens after local anti-corruption shocks, clarifying under which conditions foreign ownership serves as a help or a hinderance to firms’ productivity.

Stephen Schick “Picking Losers: Selective Expropriation of Rival Economic Elites in China,” Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, April 2026.

While the relationship between authoritarian institutions and political risk has been well documented, existing accounts provide less guidance on how changes in a country's model of economic development alter the political purposes and economic costs of expropriation. Drawing on scholarship in open political economy, state capitalism, and authoritarian control, I distinguish routine rent collection from coercive expropriation intended to discipline political actors and from eliminative expropriation that removes firms or owners from economic life. I argue that this distinction becomes increasingly important in late-developing economies, and in China in particular, because the same investments in human capital, technology, and organizational capacity that make private firms valuable sources of growth can also allow their owners and managers to accumulate political leverage. Local officials consequently face a choice among firms whose coercion offers different political benefits and imposes different economic costs. I represent this choice in a formal model of a newly appointed municipal party secretary and derive observable expectations concerning leadership turnover, factional alignment, political embeddedness, exit capacity, and the physical seizability of firm assets. To evaluate these expectations, I construct a panel of publicly listed Chinese firms linked to the career histories of their managers and local political officials, and examine how firm-level extraction changes when municipal turnover alters the incoming secretary's exposure to rival factions. The results indicate that when turnover changes the local factional balance, rival-aligned firms embedded in political networks face higher formal tax pressure, while politically unembedded rival firms exhibit a decline in reported tax burdens consistent with extraction moving through less formal channels. Firms' asset composition and capacity to move investments also shape the channel through which this pressure appears, although the exit-capacity results depart from the model's initial expectation.

Stephen Schick “Expropriation in Late-Developing Autocracies,” Presented at Southern Political Science Association Annual Conference, January 2025.

While the relationship between authoritarian institutions and political risk has been well documented in the political economy literature, less attention has been paid to how changes in development and industrial models can alter the political motivations behind expropriation. Drawing on scholarship in political risk, state capitalism, and authoritarian control, I disaggregate expropration's co-optive, coercive, and eliminative incentives. I argue that for late developing states, increased reliance on investment, human capital, and innovation to maintain growth raise the negative economic externalities of deploying expropriative policies. Simultaneously, the accrual of wealth by emergent economic elites motivates expropriation's coercive benefits, particularly in contexts where economic elite leverage is strong. Under these conditions, I anticipate that autocrats will be highly selective in their use of coercive expropriation, deploying selective fiscal and regulatory incentives punctuated with legal prosecution of politically-exposed corporate executives affiliated with rival political elites. I evaluate these expectations in a cross-national panel study of authoritarian regimes and their constituent elite ruling coalitions, assessing how shifting industrial bases and new sources of economic growth relate to the levels of political risk faced by domestic firms and the degree of legal prosecutions levied against economic elites. I support this quantitative analysis with four case studies, looking at developmental transitions in South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and China to assess how authoritarian regimes adapt their expropriative portfolios over time.

Chloe Bernadaux and Stephen Schick “Economic Conditions and the Shaping of Subnational Propaganda under Autocracy,” Presented at Southern Political Science Association Annual Conference, January 2025.

How do autocratic regimes adjust their propaganda strategies during economic downturns? Propaganda serves as a strategic mechanism to manage relationships with key societal groups, including the masses and economic elites, by signaling the regime’s stability, capacity, and intentions. This study hypothesizes that in the face of negative economic shocks, autocratic regimes recalibrate their propaganda to prioritize repression, reduce reliance on specific performance-based legitimation, shift towards diffuse ideological narratives of resilience and unity, and resort to a diversionary strategy. To test these hypotheses, we analyze an original dataset of over 120,000 articles from provincial newspapers in China between 2014 and 2023, employing topic-modeling, and word-embedding techniques to classify propaganda frames. By leveraging floods as an instrumental variable for economic shocks, we establish a causal link between economic conditions and the composition of propaganda. Our findings reveal that economic downturns lead to significant shifts in propaganda strategies, highlighting the regime’s adaptability in navigating crises to sustain public compliance and elite loyalty. This study sheds light on the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of propaganda in authoritarian regimes, challenging the notion of uniform messaging across regions and economic conditions.

Stephen Schick “Feeding Tigers and Taming Dragons: Inter-Municipal Economic Competition in China," Submitted to the 2027 Western Political Science Association Conference.

Research into China’s political economy has centered on the critical role of local governments, from county, to municipal, and up to the provincial level, in fostering economic growth through competitive and selective investment in local enterprises such as reduced regulatory and fiscal burdens, localized subsidies, and low-interest loans. However, previous research has paid less attention to the degree these local governments compete among each other to facilitate their established local champions, and whether protecting these enterprises involves attempts to hamper their competitors from other localities. Drawing on a formal model of competition for tax revenues and economic growth between municipalities operating in China’s multi-level governance system, I anticipate the conditions where the tradeoffs for local governments transition from complementary effects to substitutive effects for specific industries depending on their domestic and international competitiveness as well as their local political embeddedness. I evaluate these predictions using a novel dataset of firm-level political ties combined with data on local firm investments and corporate ownership structure to assess where the points of friction may lie between Chinese municipal governments and their favored firms. I further evaluate how this inter-municipal competition affects the levels of debt burdens for municipal governments, anticipating that local governments engaged in more intense competition will become increasingly indebted over time in their efforts to support local enterprises. I support the causal mechanisms identified in the formal model with case studies of three highly competitive sectors between municipal governments: 1) the boutique alcohol and tobacco industry; 2) shipbuilding; and 3) electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing.

Schick, Stephen “From Doorstep to Drop Site: Implications of Civil-Military Integration in China’s Low-Altitude Economy Initiative for PLA Logistics,” Presented at RAND  Summer Associate Seminar Series, August 2026.

How do developmental autocracies expand education without empowering the students and intellectuals most capable of challenging authoritarian rule? Existing research generally presents education as a dilemma for autocrats: investments in human capital promote economic development and performance legitimacy, but universities also facilitate political communication, collective organization, and the emergence of opposition elites. I argue that developmental autocracies do not simply choose between educational expansion and political control. Instead, they construct systems of managed educational mobility that channel popular demand for education toward state-defined economic objectives while raising the individual and collective costs of dissent. Through comparative historical analysis and process tracing, I examine higher education and state-led development in Nationalist Taiwan under martial law, the People’s Republic of China under Communist Party rule, and South Korea under Park Chung Hee. I identify three recurring mechanisms through which these regimes reconciled educational development with authoritarian survival: the management of educational access and occupational placement; the surveillance, discipline, and political socialization of students and faculty; and the legitimation of unequal educational outcomes through examinations, credentials, and claims of meritocratic advancement. These mechanisms transformed educational aspirations into instruments of governance. Competitive admissions, vocational tracking, scientific and technical training, and state-mediated employment encouraged families and students to invest in the developmental project, while campus monitoring and the potential loss of educational and professional opportunities discouraged political mobilization. The comparison also demonstrates that these mechanisms varied with regime institutions, ideological projects, and strategies of industrialization. Taiwan combined centralized manpower planning with party-state surveillance and examination-based mobility; Park’s South Korea subordinated educational expansion to industrial policy while confronting recurrent student resistance; and the PRC integrated educational selection and professional advancement into a more encompassing party-state system. The paper thereby shifts attention from authoritarian educational spending to the political organization of educational demand, showing how developmental autocracies produced not merely skilled workers, but forms of disciplined aspiration and “educated acquiescence.”

Stephen Schick “The Authoritarian Education Bargain: Human Capital, Political Control, and Development in East Asia” Working paper.

How do developmental autocracies expand education without empowering the students and intellectuals most capable of challenging authoritarian rule? Existing research generally presents education as a dilemma for autocrats: investments in human capital promote economic development and performance legitimacy, but universities also facilitate political communication, collective organization, and the emergence of opposition elites. I argue that developmental autocracies do not simply choose between educational expansion and political control. Instead, they construct systems of managed educational mobility that channel popular demand for education toward state-defined economic objectives while raising the individual and collective costs of dissent. Through comparative historical analysis and process tracing, I examine higher education and state-led development in Nationalist Taiwan under martial law, the People’s Republic of China under Communist Party rule, and South Korea under Park Chung Hee. I identify three recurring mechanisms through which these regimes reconciled educational development with authoritarian survival: the management of educational access and occupational placement; the surveillance, discipline, and political socialization of students and faculty; and the legitimation of unequal educational outcomes through examinations, credentials, and claims of meritocratic advancement. These mechanisms transformed educational aspirations into instruments of governance. Competitive admissions, vocational tracking, scientific and technical training, and state-mediated employment encouraged families and students to invest in the developmental project, while campus monitoring and the potential loss of educational and professional opportunities discouraged political mobilization. The comparison also demonstrates that these mechanisms varied with regime institutions, ideological projects, and strategies of industrialization. Taiwan combined centralized manpower planning with party-state surveillance and examination-based mobility; Park’s South Korea subordinated educational expansion to industrial policy while confronting recurrent student resistance; and the PRC integrated educational selection and professional advancement into a more encompassing party-state system. The paper thereby shifts attention from authoritarian educational spending to the political organization of educational demand, showing how developmental autocracies produced not merely skilled workers, but forms of disciplined aspiration and “educated acquiescence.”

Stephen Schick “Sovereignty Against Liberalism: Wang Huning between Carl Schmitt and American Straussian Conservatism”  Working paper.

This paper examines the intellectual foundations of Wang Huning’s critique of American liberalism and its relationship to a broader revival of statist and antiliberal political thought in China. Beginning with Wang’s early graduate research on Western theories of sovereignty and his subsequent book National Sovereignty (1987), I trace a Schmittian conception of political order in which sovereign authority, political unity, and the preservation of collective identity precede liberal procedures and individual rights. I then examine how these concerns reappear in America Against America (1992), particularly in Wang’s engagement with American neoconservative and Straussian diagnoses of moral decline, familial disintegration, and liberalism’s inability to reproduce the cultural foundations of social order. Rather than treating Wang as an isolated theorist, I situate him within the wider reception of Carl Schmitt among Chinese statist, New Left, and “China Path” intellectuals. Schmittian concepts of sovereignty, political unity, decision, and the friend-enemy distinction have supplied Chinese thinkers with a vocabulary for debating Communist Party leadership, constitutionalism, national security, and China’s place in the international order. The paper argues that Schmittian state theory and Straussian cultural criticism represent complementary components of Wang’s antiliberal thought: the former explains the authority required to preserve political order, while the latter diagnoses the social and moral fragmentation that makes such authority necessary. This synthesis helps place Wang within a transnational politics of antiliberalism connecting contemporary Chinese statism to parallel intellectual developments in the United States.

Allison Harnett and Stephen Schick, “Billionaires Across Regimes: Evaluating How Regime Type Affects Wealth Concentration,” Working paper.

Drawing from a Forbes database of the world’s wealthiest people and firm-level panel data, this paper evaluates how differences in regime type foster different kinds of billionaires. Sectors which favor state control and immobile assets, such as real estate, natural resources, and agriculture, are more common sources of wealth under authoritarianism, while investment-heavy and human capital-dependent sectors like finance, health, and high technology dominant in democratic contexts. The paper goes on to discuss the theoretical implications of these findings, as well as their potential effects on democratic backsliding and authoritarian transitions.

Beyond my current working papers, my dissertation will provide the foundation for a first book, Picking Losers: Governing Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Among China's Economic Elites on authoritarian governance and private wealth in China. The book broadens the analysis from coercion and expropriation to the CCP's full repertoire of co-optation, managed voice, and constraints on exit. Extending beyond my dissertation's focus on expropriation, \textit{Picking Losers} will integrate how  the carrots of industrial subsidies, tax incentives, and legal forebearance are balanced with the sticks of expropriative coercion, arrest, or exile to shape the incentives of China's new upper class. I will then balance this focus on top-down (dis)incentives with a careful consideration of how economic elites navigate this framework using their financial and political capital, drawing from planned interviews and field work in China, the United States, Australia, and Singapore. The book will argue that China's authoritarian resilience rests on a developmental bargain of co-optative private-sector enrichment and the subtle threat of repression, where innovation, investment,  migration, and political advocacy are carefully managed by the CCP. 

My second book project, The Politics of Wealth in Emerging Technologies, examines how new technologies create fortunes, constituencies, and institutional legacies that subsequently shape innovation and politics. This book would combine historical political economy research, examining how emerging technologies, property rights, patents, and industrial policy have in turn created opportunities and lasting legacies of wealth which can both advance these technologies and also limit or destroy them. Drawing from the comparative political economy literature, economics literature on innovation and property rights, science and technology studies, the book will progress through historical cases, evaluating how the creation of wealth through emerging technologies shapes the political behaviors of the actors, families, and firms who control the technology, and how this relates to political change. I then turn to a contemporary comparison of the politics of wealth in emerging technologies between the United States, European Union, and China in markets for AI, semiconductors, and EVs.

Together, these books anchor a broader comparative agenda on how wealth and economic disruption reshape elite politics. One study combines property purchases, investment disclosures, and legal changes to explain why elites from China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia invest in established democracies and how those investments affect host communities. ``Weathering the Storm'' examines how the duration, severity, and type of economic crisis shift autocracies from restrictions toward violence and elite purges through cross-national analysis and comparative process tracing in East Asia.