Yuehong ‘cassandra’ Tai
Biographic Data
| ID | 1085602 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yuehong ‘cassandra’ Tai |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yuehong ‘cassandra’ |
| FAMILY NAME | Tai |
| SIGNATURE | TAI Y ‘C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7303-7443 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Macrodiscontent across countries
Public discontent with the political system has become an increasingly salient concern in recent years, with the argument that it undermines democratic stability and effective governance. Nevertheless, the understanding of the nature, trends, and drivers of political discontent remain debated, largely reflecting the constraints from available survey data and items in the construction of measurement. This article takes advantage of state-of-the-ar…
Trust in civil servants: A cross-national dataset for public policy research, 1986–2022
Trust in civil servants is essential for effective governance, enabling policy implementation, public service delivery, and compliance. However, the lack of comparable cross-national data on trust in bureaucracy has limited our ability to systematically examine these relationships. To address this gap, we develop the Trust in Civil Servants (TCS) dataset with an advanced latent-variable modeling technique, using 123 national and cross-national su…
Introducing the trust in government (TrustGov) dataset: A new resource for cross-national time-series trust research
Although political trust is a long-standing interdisciplinary topic, the lack of com parable cross-national time-series data has limited scholars’ ability to analyze its determinants and consequences and to generalize findings across countries and over time. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Trust in National Government (TrustGov) Dataset—a cross-national time-series resource covering 115 countries and territories from 1973 to 2020, …
Elected officials’ Online Sharing of Misinformation: Institutional and Ideological Checks
Elected officials occupy privileged positions in public communication about important topics – roles that extend to the digital world. In the same way that public officials stand to lead constructive online dialogue, they also hold the potential to accelerate the dissemination of harmful content. We explore and explain the sharing of misinformation, which we refer to as low-factual content, by examining nearly 500,000 Facebook posts by U.S. state…
An incomplete recipe: One-dimensional latent variables do not capture the full flavor of democratic support
Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support. This ignores ample evidence that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional. Here we provide a series of validation tests of the sort of cross-national time-series latent variable measures employed in recent research by reference to questions on support for l…
Public Support for Gay Rights Across Countries and Over Time
Objective Support for gay rights has increased in the publics of many countries over recent decades, but the scholarship on the topic has been hindered by the limited available data on these trends in public opinion. The goal of the Support for Gay Rights (SGR) dataset is to overcome this problem. Method The SGR dataset is constructed by combining a comprehensive collection of survey data with a latent‐variable model to provide annual time‐series…
The Upsides and Downsides of Generalized Trust: The Moderating Role of Democratic Institutions
Does generalized trust play a role in the public's tax compliance? Traditional wisdom claims that generalized trust can affect the public’s compliance with paying taxes by reducing concerns about free-riders and facilitating public goods provision. However, there is little empirical evidence of a statistically significant relationship between generalized trust and tax morale in comparative studies. Using data from the World Values Survey and Euro…
Revisiting the evidence on thermostatic response to democratic change: Degrees of Democratic Support or Researcher Degrees of Freedom
Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: …
Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a; 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival-and challenged its reciprocal counterpart-by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-n…
Official yet questionable: Examining misinformation in U.S. state legislators’ tweets
We study the roles of elected officials in the dissemination of misinformation on Twitter. This is a particularly salient online population since elected officials serve as primary sources of information for many stakeholders in the public, media, government, and industry. We analyze the content of tweets posted from the accounts of over 3,000 U.S. state lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. Specifically, we identify the dissemination of URLs linke…
Policy adoption and diffusion during the Covid-19 crisis
During the COVID-19 crisis, what explains the variation in policy adoptionamong Chinese provincial governments? To answer this question, we gathered data on twenty-five COVID-19 containment policies used in China from 31 December 2019 to 18 March 2020. We conducted state-of-the-art multilevel pooled event history analysis to allow us to control for policy heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that variation in policy adoption during the crisis l…
Determinants of Chinese Provincial Governments’ Responses to the 2018 Vaccine Scandal
Scholars who study governance in authoritarian countries have long highlighted the importance of fiscal capacity and pressure from the central government in determining the responsiveness and policy changes of subnational governments. However, policy orientation is also important in shaping how subnational governments react to a crisis. Using provincial governments’ responses during the 2018 Chinese vaccine scandal, I find strong evidence that an…
Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a; 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival-and challenged its reciprocal counterpart-by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-n…
Revisiting the evidence on thermostatic response to democratic change: Degrees of Democratic Support or Researcher Degrees of Freedom
Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: …
An incomplete recipe: One-dimensional latent variables do not capture the full flavor of democratic support
Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support. This ignores ample evidence that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional. Here we provide a series of validation tests of the sort of cross-national time-series latent variable measures employed in recent research by reference to questions on support for l…
Policy adoption and diffusion during the Covid-19 crisis
During the COVID-19 crisis, what explains the variation in policy adoptionamong Chinese provincial governments? To answer this question, we gathered data on twenty-five COVID-19 containment policies used in China from 31 December 2019 to 18 March 2020. We conducted state-of-the-art multilevel pooled event history analysis to allow us to control for policy heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that variation in policy adoption during the crisis l…
Determinants of Chinese Provincial Governments’ Responses to the 2018 Vaccine Scandal
Scholars who study governance in authoritarian countries have long highlighted the importance of fiscal capacity and pressure from the central government in determining the responsiveness and policy changes of subnational governments. However, policy orientation is also important in shaping how subnational governments react to a crisis. Using provincial governments’ responses during the 2018 Chinese vaccine scandal, I find strong evidence that an…
Official yet questionable: Examining misinformation in U.S. state legislators’ tweets
We study the roles of elected officials in the dissemination of misinformation on Twitter. This is a particularly salient online population since elected officials serve as primary sources of information for many stakeholders in the public, media, government, and industry. We analyze the content of tweets posted from the accounts of over 3,000 U.S. state lawmakers throughout 2020 and 2021. Specifically, we identify the dissemination of URLs linke…
Revisiting the evidence on thermostatic response to democratic change: Degrees of Democratic Support or Researcher Degrees of Freedom
Prominent recent work argues that support for democracy behaves thermostatically—that democratic erosion boosts democratic support while deepening democracy yields public backlash—and further contends that there is no evidence for the classic argument that democracy itself increases democratic support over time. Here, we document how these conclusions depend on subtle choices in measurement coding that constitute “researcher degrees of freedom”: …
Democracy, Public Support, and Measurement Uncertainty
Do democratic regimes depend on public support to avoid backsliding? Does public support, in turn, respond thermostatically to changes in democracy? Two prominent recent studies (Claassen 2020a; 2020b) reinvigorated the classic hypothesis on the positive relationship between public support for democracy and regime survival-and challenged its reciprocal counterpart-by using a latent variable approach to measure mass democratic support from cross-n…
An incomplete recipe: One-dimensional latent variables do not capture the full flavor of democratic support
Prominent recent works have measured democratic support using a single latent variable that purports to span a single dimension from steadfast opposition to whole-hearted support. This ignores ample evidence that support for democracy is complex and multidimensional. Here we provide a series of validation tests of the sort of cross-national time-series latent variable measures employed in recent research by reference to questions on support for l…
Public Support for Gay Rights Across Countries and Over Time
Objective Support for gay rights has increased in the publics of many countries over recent decades, but the scholarship on the topic has been hindered by the limited available data on these trends in public opinion. The goal of the Support for Gay Rights (SGR) dataset is to overcome this problem. Method The SGR dataset is constructed by combining a comprehensive collection of survey data with a latent‐variable model to provide annual time‐series…
The Upsides and Downsides of Generalized Trust: The Moderating Role of Democratic Institutions
Does generalized trust play a role in the public's tax compliance? Traditional wisdom claims that generalized trust can affect the public’s compliance with paying taxes by reducing concerns about free-riders and facilitating public goods provision. However, there is little empirical evidence of a statistically significant relationship between generalized trust and tax morale in comparative studies. Using data from the World Values Survey and Euro…
Macrodiscontent across countries
Public discontent with the political system has become an increasingly salient concern in recent years, with the argument that it undermines democratic stability and effective governance. Nevertheless, the understanding of the nature, trends, and drivers of political discontent remain debated, largely reflecting the constraints from available survey data and items in the construction of measurement. This article takes advantage of state-of-the-ar…
Trust in civil servants: A cross-national dataset for public policy research, 1986–2022
Trust in civil servants is essential for effective governance, enabling policy implementation, public service delivery, and compliance. However, the lack of comparable cross-national data on trust in bureaucracy has limited our ability to systematically examine these relationships. To address this gap, we develop the Trust in Civil Servants (TCS) dataset with an advanced latent-variable modeling technique, using 123 national and cross-national su…
Introducing the trust in government (TrustGov) dataset: A new resource for cross-national time-series trust research
Although political trust is a long-standing interdisciplinary topic, the lack of com parable cross-national time-series data has limited scholars’ ability to analyze its determinants and consequences and to generalize findings across countries and over time. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Trust in National Government (TrustGov) Dataset—a cross-national time-series resource covering 115 countries and territories from 1973 to 2020, …
Elected officials’ Online Sharing of Misinformation: Institutional and Ideological Checks
Elected officials occupy privileged positions in public communication about important topics – roles that extend to the digital world. In the same way that public officials stand to lead constructive online dialogue, they also hold the potential to accelerate the dissemination of harmful content. We explore and explain the sharing of misinformation, which we refer to as low-factual content, by examining nearly 500,000 Facebook posts by U.S. state…
Political science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Democracy (4 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Social Media and Politics (4 works) · Business (3 works) · Economics (3 works) · Government (linguistics (3 works)