Employers seek to transform labor power into labor by implementing multiple forms of labor control. These multiple control practices, however, may not obtain consent but rather resistance from workers. Why do employers’ multiple control practices fail, and how is this failure related to workers’ acts of resistance? The author draws on existing research to classify employers’ control practices into three categories—technical, organizational, and ideational—and argues that these practices contradict each other systematically and give rise to resistance. An ethnographic study at factories in China shows that employers’ control practices impose conflicting demands on workers. These tensions create the basis, grievance, and mentality for workers’ acts of resistance. This article provides a unified theoretical framework for analyzing contradictions within labor control and contributes to a long tradition of Chinese factory life ethnographies.

How is internal migration related to political efficacy and participation in autocracies? Existing research emphasizes migration’s socioeconomic impact, given the staggering internal migration volume in developing countries, but pays inadequate attention to its relationship with politics. We argue that migrants are more likely to interact with the government and possess greater political efficacy than non-migrants. When migrants return home, they are motivated by higher political efficacy to participate more in politics than non-migrants. We test the theory using four nationally representative surveys in China from 2006 to 2014 and find that returning migrants are more confident in understanding and influencing politics. However, they vote less in elections and avoid challenging the government collectively. Exploratory analysis shows that the counterintuitive results arise because returning migrants shift from traditional political participation, like voting, to new means, like lodging complaints online. The relationship between migration and politics is contingent on the authoritarian context.

In contrast to ongoing scholarly and activists’ focus on global companies’ public disclosure of labor issues in their supply chains to promote lead firm accountability and improvement, the authors bring in local actors and conceptualize how elements of supplier accountability may shape the effects of public disclosure on the ground. The authors draw on multiple sources of data, especially ILO’s Better Work (BW) program, which publicly discloses selected labor standards. Using difference-in-differences analysis of 5,330 BW factory assessments across seven countries from 2015 to 2020 February, they find that public disclosure does cause improvement in disclosed standards as well as positive spillover effects to undisclosed standards. The effects of public disclosure are amplified by local factors—media scrutiny of supplier violations and factory management system—while widely-focused lead firm transparency was not significant. This research calls for more attention to local actors in current global accountability and labor rights discourse.

Over the last 50 years, research has consistently found that democracy decreases state repressive behavior within the nation-state where the democracy is located—the so-called “domestic democratic peace.” While this is one of the stable findings in political science, there is one circumstance in which the pacifying influence is not found: when behavioral threats within the nation-state in question are made against political authorities. Extending existing research, this article explores whether democracy can decrease state repression in the presence of what we call “transnational democratic political threats” (DTPTs), defined as periods when an overt political challenge has emerged and is directed against several governments simultaneously. Examining data on 157 countries from 1976 to 2015 (across the Cold War and War on Terror), we find that, as with domestic behavioral threats, when DTPTs exist, the pacifying influence of democracy on state repression is significantly weakened.

How can collective action occur in autocracies despite targeted repression? Existing literature suggests that collective action in autocracies emerges from shocks and grows as ordinary people are mobilized by political entrepreneurs, mobilizing organizations, or social networks. However, what if the authorities target these mobilizing agents or pre-existing structures? This article argues that ordinary people can themselves differentiate their roles in collective action and create temporary social connections for mobilization. This networked mobilization can increase collective action while evading targeted repression because temporary ties help coordinate ordinary people and blunts the authorities’ targeting. Empirically, the article examines worker mobilization in China in the 2010s, leveraging government crackdowns and unique strike data. Network and difference-in-differences analysis show that temporarily connected workers convinced more co-workers to join strikes, and repeated crackdowns failed to eliminate them. The findings highlight the strength of temporary ties for mobilizing ordinary people and circumventing targeted repression in autocracies.

How do ordinary people take collective action in autocracies? Existing formal theories study how information revealed by shocks or political entrepreneurs drives ordinary people into collective action. However, how ordinary people evaluate information depends on their socio-political environment. This article theorizes a novel means that ordinary people overcome social divisions and political repression to take collective action. Formally, it builds on the global game but replaces its unit mass with a divided, heterogeneous mass of ordinary people. The new model, networked mobilization, characterizes under what conditions ordinary people differentiate roles in collective action – initiators and potential participants – and encourage one another to act. Networked mobilization increases collective action participation and facilitates its diffusion in autocracies. It distinguishes initiators from political entrepreneurs, demonstrating initiators’ unique role in mobilizing potential participants. The findings suggest that collective action can emerge endogenously in autocracies, shedding light on surprising protests despite authorities’ tightening control.

While considerable research has examined how governments shape citizens’ perceptions of repression, less attention has been paid to the capacity of challengers—such as opposition parties, activist groups, or disaffected citizens—to contest these narratives and influence public opinion, particularly in competitive authoritarian regimes. We argue that challengers can reframe state repression using either particularistic or universalistic approaches to reduce public support for such practices. Particularistic framing highlights specific instances or victims of repression, whereas universalistic framing emphasizes broader critiques of the regime. Both strategies can prompt citizens to reevaluate their views on state repression. Drawing on a survey experiment with a representative sample of 2,056 Zimbabwean citizens in Harare, we find that challenger framing can partially undermine government narratives by decreasing support for the justifiability of repression. Notably, particularistic framing proves more effective in Zimbabwe’s context, diverging from patterns observed in Western societies where universalistic framing tends to dominate.