This dissertation consists of three distinct articles that address how the degree of judicial independence allowed in authoritarian regimes is influenced by (1) international economic pressures, (2) political competition among elites, and (3) mass mobilization.

In the first chapter, I examine the role that international economic pressures play in autocratic regimes' decision to establish an independent judiciary. Autocrats face conflicting incentives when deciding the level of independence they will grant to the judiciary. On one hand, a constrained judiciary can serve as another instrument of authoritarian rule. On the other hand, and independent judiciary can serve as a credible commitment device to protect property rights. I argue that the presence of abundant natural resources, specifically fossil fuels, provides the regime with an income source that does not require such a credible commitment, and therefore reduces the incentive to allow an independent judiciary, giving the autocrat more leeway to keep the judiciary constrained. Using cross-national data, I show that an abundance of fossil fuels in autocracies is associated with a less independent judiciary. I show that this association between fossil fuels and judicial independence is specific to autocracies, not democracies. Additionally, I explore whether the abundance of fossil fuels leads to either formal and/or informal attacks on judicial independence, and I find evidence of both. In the second chapter, I investigate the relationship between elite-level political competition and judicial independence in autocracies. A popular theory for judicial independence, insurance theory, posits that the presence of political competition causes incumbent political leaders to insulate their judiciaries from manipulation, to deny opposition the ability to politicize the courts in the event they take power. However, a number of studies conflict with insurance theory on empirical and theoretical grounds, raising questions of when and why we can expect insurance theory to offer explanatory power for autocracies. I argue that insurance theory can indeed hold in autocracies, but only in autocracies where the risk of a coup d'état is low. In contexts where incumbents have reason to fear coup attempts, insurance theory loses explanatory power, and we observe the reverse relationship between political competition and judicial independence. To empirically test my argument, I use cross-national data on judicial independence, electoral competition, and coup risk. My results show that the presence of competition within the political system is indeed associated with more judicial independence, but the presence of a credible coup threat is associated with less judicial independence. This analysis offers a novel explanation as to why insurance theory fails to explain some autocratic contexts.

In the third chapter, I analyze the ways in which the presence of different types of mass-based opposition influence how autocratic regimes structure their judiciaries. There has been a growing interest in explaining the emergence of judicial independence in autocracies. However, much of the existing literature has explained the emergence of judicial independence as a function of elite-based opposition threats and international pressures, and lacks an analysis of the influence of mass-based opposition. I argue that autocratic regimes are indeed influenced by mass-based opposition threats when deciding whether to establish judicial independence, but the direction of that influence depends critically on the nature of that opposition. When mass-based opposition is violent and/or unorganized, a decrease in judicial independence is expected, and an increase otherwise. I run a series of OLS, panel, and logistic regressions on cross-national data on all anti-regime mass opposition movements in autocracies from 1950 to 2010. I find that mass-based opposition movements are less likely to be associated with judicial independence when they are more violent and/or more organized. This evidence suggests that, when autocratic regimes are deciding whether to establish judicial independence, they are responsive to mass-based opposition threats.

This dissertation addresses an understudied and poorly understood topic, judicial systems under authoritarian regimes. Specifically, this dissertation explores the peculiar phenomena of why some autocratic regimes actually appear to respect judicial independence in ways that are not necessarily dissimilar to democratic regimes. Consistent with existing literature, I show that theories of, and related to, judicial independence in democratic contexts can have some explanatory power in non-democracies. However, I contribute to the existing literature by identifying the specific characteristics present in many authoritarian that produce outcomes that run counter to the predictions of existing theories.

Having power is having the ability to control others and influence their actions. A nation with soft power has the ability to be appealing to distant audiences, promote its values, and finally influence foreign audiences by placing its influence (Nye, 2004, 2008; Tuch, 1990). In order to enhance and implement soft power, governments have made efforts to influence international public opinion through public diplomacy (Gilboa, 2008), an instrument employed by both governmental and non-governmental roles to communicate with foreign citizens by mobilizing any available resources in order to influence overseas citizens’ longterm attitudes and preferences (Nye, 1990, 2004, 2008).

There have been significant efforts made to understand how public diplomacy is conducted, especially on social media platforms such as on Facebook and Twitter (Kampf et al., 2015). Those works usually focus on Russia and the US, the two countries with significant experience in influencing overseas public opinion (Fisher, 2020). Particularly, the US, the democratic country that has engaged in public diplomacy the most successfully, has promoted its political culture throughout the world. How about the public diplomacy practiced by authoritarian nations? China, the world’s largest authoritarian nation, has received less attention as a new player in public diplomacy. Recently, China’s international favorability has reached a historically low level. The Pew Research Center reported that China’s unfavorability in the US increased from 42% 1 to 76%2 . Does this mean that the public diplomacy conducted by the authoritarian country failed?

Furthermore, previous studies on public diplomacy are comprised largely of descriptive studies examining the originators and content of public diplomacy messages with only scant attention paid to the recipients and the actual effects of those messages. Moreover, existing research tends to focus on government-sponsored media networks and educational programs, such as the Confucius Institute (Hartig, 2012) and English-language graduate programs (Metzgar, 2016), whereas the effects of nongovernmental roles have been underexplored.

I intend to fill the gaps in the field of research with my dissertation composing of three separate studies that center around a research question: Does authoritarian public diplomacy work? Under the current context of China’s aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy, my first chapter, Chinese “Wolf Warrior” Diplomacy and Foreign Public Opinion, investigates the effects of tweets of Chinese diplomats and Chinese statecontrolled media by using 2 × 2 online survey experiments. I found that the Chinese diplomats' tweets can positively influence Americans' attitudes toward China, but the Chinese media's tweets do not. Among the Chinese diplomats' tweets, positive tweets about China can influence Americans' attitudes toward China in a positive way, whereas negative tweets about the US have litter effects on their opinion. Furthermore, positive-China tweets may be effective only on China-related issues, which indicates that public diplomacy messages have limited effects on shaping a foreign audience's attitudes toward their own country. Lastly, I find that labels largely have no impact on a diplomatic tweet's effect.

The second chapter, Do Authoritarian Mega-events Affect International Public Opinion? Evidence from the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, explores the potential of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to reshape China's international image through public diplomacy efforts. Mega-events like the Olympics offer opportunities for nations to improve their favorability and boost product sales. The paper aims to understand the effects of the Olympics and the underlying mechanism of how newly gained knowledge about China affects foreign public opinion. Specifically, using a two-round panel survey, the paper investigates the effects of the Olympics on foreign perceptions of China and which types of knowledge have the most significant impact on public opinion. Results indicate that the Olympics have limited ability to change public views of China, and in some cases, may have a backfired effect. In other hand, people gained significantly more positive knowledge about China after the Olympics, which positively correlated with increased curiosity about Chinese culture and a stronger desire to foster peaceful relations with China. Overall, the paper provides insights into the actual impact of public diplomacy strategies in the context of mega-events like the Olympics.

This first two chapters discusses the effects of public diplomacy efforts made by the government. In contrast to traditional diplomacy, both governmental and nongovernmental actors can take part in public diplomacy. The third chapter, How NonGovernmental Diplomacy Affects International Public Opinion: Evidence from a Cultural Social Media Influencer, looking at the effects of nongovernmental actors. In China, considerable resources have been allocated to government-driven public diplomacy initiatives, such as Confucius Institutes and internationalizing state-controlled news channels. However, these efforts have demonstrated limited success. In contrast, the global popularity of Chinese content creators such as Li Ziqi highlights the potential effectiveness of nongovernmental public diplomacy focusing on Chinese culture. Existing research largely focuses on government-led digital public diplomacy, neglecting the role of nongovernmental actors. This paper fills this gap by employing a survey experiment to examine the impact of Li Ziqi's Twitter content on American participants and whether official endorsement from the Chinese local government influences their perceptions. The study reveals that Li Ziqi's content positively influenced participants' general view of China and their feelings towards Chinese people, but not in specific issue topics such as China's international roles. Second, official endorsement from Sichuan government did not significantly affect the persuasiveness of her content. Furthermore, the study finds that international orientation (hawkish vs. dovish) is not a crucial factor in determining the effects of public diplomacy messages. This research offers valuable insights into the effectiveness of diverse public diplomacy strategies in shaping foreign perceptions.

This dissertation consists of three distinct articles that address two important but understudied questions in authoritarian politics: (1) how the effects of nominally democratic institutions on regime survival are conditioned by other traditional dictatorial toolkits and (2) how institutional changes are associated with information manipulation and media reports.

In the first paper, I examine how different authoritarian institutions interact by showing that subnational elections’ effect on regime survival is conditional on the free flow of information. I argue that the benefit of subnational elections for regime survival is conditional on a lack of media freedom: As the level of media freedom increases, the positive influence of holding subnational elections on regime survival decreases. This is because subnational elections provide local politicians with opportunities to build good reputations, and when good reputations formed at the local level spread to other jurisdictions via relatively free media, citizens can use them as a focal point to coordinate against the regime. I find empirical support for my theory using the quantitative analysis of Time-Series Cross-Sectional data.

The second paper examines the conventional wisdom that autocrats engage in more repression after successfully circumventing term limits, a popular personalization tool in contemporary autocracies. I argue that the answer is only a partial yes. First, the evasion is followed by an increase in covert repression (information manipulation) but not overt repression because the impending threat comes from diffuse and less explicitly identified masses. Moreover, and somewhat paradoxically, this increase is more likely to occur after term limit extensions, the less severe form of term limit evasion, than after term limit removals, the more severe form of evasion. This is because the removal serves as a costly signal about regime capacity that dissuades the masses from protesting, substituting repression. Using time-series cross-sectional data on authoritarian countries with term limits and leveraging a difference-in-differences estimator with matched sets that address endogeneity issues carefully, I find empirical support for my theory.

In the last paper, I discuss the relationship between autocratization and delegitimizing propaganda. Autocratization increases threats from marginalized opposition elites whose parties are more incentivized to mobilize the masses. What do autocrats do to counter this threat? I argue that autocrats increase delegitimizing propaganda, exaggerating the disunity of opposition parties strategically. It undermines opposition parties’ legitimacy as a competent alternative that conveys consistent and credible information. Moreover, this propaganda complements existing censorship. To validate my argument, I compare how regime-controlled newspapers in the South Korean dictatorship cover two very similar internal conflicts in the opposition party that occurred before and after autocratization. Using word embeddings that quantify delegitimizing propaganda, I find that newspaper reports after autocratization were more likely to associate the opposition party with negative words related to disunity.