Gary Leung

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where I study nationalism, authoritarian politics, and political psychology, with a regional focus on China.

My dissertation, Nationalism and Authoritarian Rule, asks when nationalism strengthens authoritarian rule and at what cost. Conventional wisdom holds that relying on nationalism as a legitimation strategy constrains autocrats abroad by raising the risk of popular nationalist backlash. I argue that it can also impose a cost at home by weakening citizens' attachment to the nation itself. This domestic cost arises specifically from state nationalism, which defines the nation through a common state with its political institutions and territorial boundaries. State nationalism creates a legitimacy–unity trade-off: closely linking the nation to the state can increase perceived regime legitimacy, but it also allows grievances against the regime to spill over into disidentification with the nation. I test this argument with original online and laboratory experiments in mainland China and Hong Kong. Another part of the dissertation develops a self-persuasion design that shifts stable political beliefs while holding information constant across conditions.

My dissertation committee is chaired by Nicholas Sambanis, with Jennifer Gandhi and Daniel Mattingly. Before beginning my Ph.D., I received an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University and a B.S.Sc. with First Class Honours in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.