Bruce Gilley
Biographic Data
| ID | 3731245 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Gilley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Gilley |
| SIGNATURE | GILLEY B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Portland State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1170-1502 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 608 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Capital structure and business failure
In popular lore, the failure of Canada’s once-biggest company, Dome Petroleum, was caused by the interventionist policies of the federal government or its misadventures drilling for oil in the Arctic. But these factors acted in varied ways on the company. Rather, corporate finance theories offer more insight into the dynamics that led to Dome’s takeover by the American oil major Amoco in 1988. Dome was unique in its unwillingness to issue new sha…
Can Fiscal Recentralization Strengthen Local Government? The Case of Thailand
Thailand in 2018 became the latest developing country to impose mandatory rules on its fiscal policy that included a national limit on the accumulation of public debt and direct control of local government budgets. Such fiscal recentralization is generally assumed in the literature on multilevel finance to weaken local economic, fiscal, and policy conditions. Yet a newer emphasis in this literature asserts the potential value of central governmen…
Will Malaysia become an active middle power
Malaysia’s economic growth and democratisation since 2003 have vaulted it into the ranks of the middle powers in the international system. However, Malaysia remains hesitant about its middle power status. It has assumed a counterhegemonic or pro-multipolarity role; it has supported some new international rules and institutions; it leads regional governance institutions; and it advocates for small countries on development issues. However, these mi…
We Need Some Muscle Over Here
At a March 2023 meeting of the NAS affiliate California Association of Scholars, NAS treasurer and board member Brue Gilley assessed the challenges and achievements of both organizations
The Case for Colonialism
Political scientist and NAS board member Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism” (republished in Academic Questions in the summer of 2018), has been the subject of countless critical essays, conference panels, seminar discussions, and journal articles. Here Gilley responds to his critics
The Minjung Millenarianism of Bandy X. Lee
In declaring President Trump mentally unfit to hold public office and a “mass killer,” Yale Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee violated the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics, which declares it unethical to diagnose a public figure without personally examining him. Political scientist Bruce Gilley explains why she did it
Assaults on capitalism and democratic backsliding
It is generally assumed that stable democracies depend on sufficient economic freedoms that support ideas of individual independence and that shift resources from state to society. The growth and consolidation of economic freedoms under capitalism has been empirically linked to the growth and consolidation of democracy. Asia as a region has generally conformed to this theory, albeit with delayed democratic transitions due to the state-directed na…
Years After Tiananmen
China's ruling Communist Party is admired by specialists for its seeming ability to deliver all kinds of things without democracy-elite stability, good governance, legitimacy, capitalist growth, and a middle class. But in all these areas, durable achievements have proven elusive. A president for life, worsening governance, and ticking time bombs of slow growth and fiscal deficits threaten stability. The balance of forces still favors the status q…
The Case for Colonialism
WITHDRAWAL NOTICEThis Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal's editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently rec…
The case for colonialism
WITHDRAWAL NOTICEThis Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal's editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently rec…
East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy
What makes a government legitimate? Why do people voluntarily comply with laws, even when no one is watching? The idea of political legitimacy captures the fact that people obey when they think governments' actions accord with valid principles. For some, what matters most is the government's performance on security and the economy. For others, only a government that follows democratic principles can be legitimate. Political legitimacy is therefor…
Taxation and Authoritarian Resilience
Taxation provides important inferences about the nature of non-oil authoritarian regimes. This article looks at taxation to understand the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s relationship to society. It finds that the party has maintained fiscal capacity through non-intrusive transactional taxes that allow it to deliver more services in wealthier areas where potential dissent is greatest. This model is reaching its limits because of its negative imp…
Technocracy and democracy as spheres of justice in public policy
Conclusion
The challenges for middle powers relate directly to their unstable positional status in the international system. Yet this unique position in the international Goldilocks Zone of having not too much power but power enough also gives them unique opportunities. Successful middle powers recognize their middle power status and then formulate a strategic diplomacy suited to this status in which they accept the centrality of great power interests and r…
Chinua Achebe on the positive legacies of colonialism
The late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was a key figure in the rise and persistence of anti-colonial ideology in Africa. Yet in his final work, Achebe made a clear statement about the positive legacies of colonialism, praising the British project of state formation and nation building in the lower Niger basin. A careful study of his writings and comments from 1958 until his death in 2013 shows that Achebe was never the simple anti-colonial figure…
The challenge of the creative Third World
This article is a contribution to recent literature on the shape of the polycentric world order. It argues that the Third World remains a valid concept for describing the interests and ideas that shape the foreign policies of many key non-Western states. However, the Third World has changed in a fundamental way. The article describes the historical emergence and contemporary manifestations of a ‘creative’ Third World in contrast to the ‘protest’ …
Coercing Climate Action
If states cannot cooperate to take action on climate change, they might begin to coerce one another to do so
China’s Discovery of Middle Powers
Middle Powers and the Rise of China
The Nature of Asian Politics
The Nature of Asian Politics is a broad and thematic treatment of the fundamental factors that characterize politics in the fourteen key countries of Southeast and Northeast Asia. Bruce Gilley begins with an overview of state-society relations, then moves on to the fundamental questions of development and democracy, and finally shifts to an exploration of governance and public policy in the region. This book proposes an Asian governance model tha…
Ideology, Realpolitik, and US Foreign Policy
Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence . By Frank P. Harvey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 360p. $103.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. The Iraq War initiated by the Bush administration in 2003 was and perhaps continues to be an important episode in world politics, US politics, and the politics of the Middle East. The war also galvanized controversy among public intellectuals and broader publics, and generated stro…
Did Bush Democratize the Middle East? The Effects of External–Internal Linkages
THE WAVE OF PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENTS and openings that swept the greater Middle East region in 2010–2012 caught the world by surprise. While the future of these openings is uncertain, their occurrence, as well as democratic changes in the region since 2001, are in need of explanation. What motivated and empowered the incidence of pro-democracy protest movements and regime liberalizations during this time? A large literature has highlighted the imp…
Authoritarian environmentalism and China's response to climate change
Authoritarian environmentalism is a non-participatory approach to public policy-making and implementation in the face of severe environmental challenges. Using the case of China's climate change policy, the meaning, causes, and consequences of authoritarian environmentalism are explored. A key finding is that authoritarian environmentalism is more effective in producing policy outputs than outcomes. Theoretical and policy implications follow
State legitimacy
A previous article in this journal presented a conceptualisation of the political legitimacy of the state and its operationalisation for 72 countries c. 2000. This article provides an updated dataset of state legitimacy for 52 countries c. 2008 using the same conceptualisation. It presents a brief discussion of the comparative results of the two datasets
Could China Be the Next Wave
China's one-party state is here to stay, many observers agree. Then again, Samuel Huntington in 1984 assessed the odds of regime change in the communist world as “virtually nil.”
The meaning and measure of state legitimacy
This article presents a quantitative measurement of the political legitimacy of states in the late 1990s and early 2000s for 72 states containing 5.1 billion people, or 83 per cent of the world's population. First, the concept of state legitimacy is defined and justified. The definition includes the subjects, objects and sub‐types of legitimacy. A strategy to achieve replicable cross‐national measurements of legitimacy is then outlined and implem…
The Determinants of State Legitimacy
This article examines a range of potential causal variables of state legitimacy using a globally representative set of 72 countries accounting for 83 percent of the world’s population. Major theories of legitimacy determinants are advanced and tested using survey and expert data. Three variables (which measure good governance, democratic rights, and welfare gains) are then chosen from among all strongly correlated variables as being the most plau…
Authoritarian environmentalism and China's response to climate change
Authoritarian environmentalism is a non-participatory approach to public policy-making and implementation in the face of severe environmental challenges. Using the case of China's climate change policy, the meaning, causes, and consequences of authoritarian environmentalism are explored. A key finding is that authoritarian environmentalism is more effective in producing policy outputs than outcomes. Theoretical and policy implications follow
Reclaiming Legitimacy in China
The contemporary politics of China reflect an ongoing effort by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reclaim the right to rule in light of the consequences of economic development, international pressures, and historical change. China's regime stands out within the Asian region for its success in the effort of adapting to change and ensuring its continuity. Focusing on changes in China's elite discourse during the reform period and particu…
Legitimacy and Institutional Change
What explains the nature of institutional change in post-1989 China? Dominant theories of institutional change focus on economic-rationalist, sociopolitical, or historical causes. Yet they have trouble explaining the pattern of institutional change in China. An alternative legitimacy-based perspective is proposed here that provides a more parsimonious and general theory of institutional change for China and potentially for other cases as well
Democratic enclaves in authoritarian regimes
This article introduces a new concept to the literature on authoritarian regimes – the 'democratic enclave' – and contrasts it to the well-known concept of the 'authoritarian enclave'. The meaning and description of democratic enclaves is given. A causal theory of democratic enclaves is outlined and their consequences considered. Theoretical and policy implications follow
The Debate on Party Legitimacy in China
We report results here from a mixed quantitative–qualitative analysis of 168 articles published in China on the question of regime and party legitimacy. We find that ideology remains a leading strategy of future legitimation for the CCP, alongside better known strategies of institution-building and social justice. We also find that liberalism, while less often proposed, remains a potent critique of regime legitimacy. We use these results to make …
China's Changing of the Guard
The success of the recent leadership transition in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might be interpreted as evidence that China's authoritarian regime is historically unique. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist orders of Eastern Europe, the CCP not only remains in power but has installed a younger, better-educated, even more confident set of successors at its head. And the CCP's Sixteenth Party Congress in…
State legitimacy
A previous article in this journal presented a conceptualisation of the political legitimacy of the state and its operationalisation for 72 countries c. 2000. This article provides an updated dataset of state legitimacy for 52 countries c. 2008 using the same conceptualisation. It presents a brief discussion of the comparative results of the two datasets
China's democratic future
China's New Rulers
At the Chinese Communist Party's 16th Congress in November 2002, a group of new leaders took over the world's most populous country. Their accession as the Fourth Generation of rulers of the People's Republic--following the generations of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin--signaled the end of a long, complex struggle for power. Yet little has been known outside high Party circles about either that struggle or the men who emerged victorio…
The case for colonialism
WITHDRAWAL NOTICEThis Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal's editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently rec…
Against the concept of ethnic conflict
Despite a boom in studies of ethnic conflict, the empirical and conceptual justification for this field remains weak. Not only are claims of surging ethnic conflict unsubstantiated, but the concept itself is problematic. The concept tends to homogenise quite distinct political phenomena. Making valid causal inferences about ‘ethnic conflict’ is nearly impossible as a result, a shortcoming reflected in the un‐robust nature of the literature on the…
Middle Powers during Great Power Transitions
What is the fate of middle powers during the transition of great powers in the international system? In particular, what happens to middle powers that are tethered to a declining unipolar power? Virtually every close ally of the United States is asking this question today against the backdrop of a rising China. The question is particularly acute for the middle powers of Asia that are aligned with the US - especially South Korea but also the Phili…
Technocracy and democracy as spheres of justice in public policy
Conclusion
The challenges for middle powers relate directly to their unstable positional status in the international system. Yet this unique position in the international Goldilocks Zone of having not too much power but power enough also gives them unique opportunities. Successful middle powers recognize their middle power status and then formulate a strategic diplomacy suited to this status in which they accept the centrality of great power interests and r…
Chinua Achebe on the positive legacies of colonialism
The late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was a key figure in the rise and persistence of anti-colonial ideology in Africa. Yet in his final work, Achebe made a clear statement about the positive legacies of colonialism, praising the British project of state formation and nation building in the lower Niger basin. A careful study of his writings and comments from 1958 until his death in 2013 shows that Achebe was never the simple anti-colonial figure…
Taxation and Authoritarian Resilience
Taxation provides important inferences about the nature of non-oil authoritarian regimes. This article looks at taxation to understand the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s relationship to society. It finds that the party has maintained fiscal capacity through non-intrusive transactional taxes that allow it to deliver more services in wealthier areas where potential dissent is greatest. This model is reaching its limits because of its negative imp…
The challenge of the creative Third World
This article is a contribution to recent literature on the shape of the polycentric world order. It argues that the Third World remains a valid concept for describing the interests and ideas that shape the foreign policies of many key non-Western states. However, the Third World has changed in a fundamental way. The article describes the historical emergence and contemporary manifestations of a ‘creative’ Third World in contrast to the ‘protest’ …
Paradigms of Chinese Politics
More than three decades of research since reforms were launched has significantly expanded our understanding of China's changing political landscape. In that period, new paradigmatic assumptions have been brought to bear on the study of China to challenge the traditional state-centered approach. Among these have been state–society, society-centered, historical, and globalized models. While such works have enriched our understanding of this dynami…
Democratic Triumph, Scholarly Pessimism
By any measure, democratization has achieved remarkable advances over the past twenty years. Why, then, have so many of the leading works written on the topic during this period been so full of gloom
Legitimacy Crisis
Since the dawn of time, it seems, social critics have been warning of a “crisis of legitimacy” in the political world. Manuel Castells repeats this ageless battle-cry in his 2004 Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture (PS, January 2005, 9–16), warning darkly of an “increasing alienation of citizens” that “threatens to undo the democratic system” (9). As proof, he offers an array of point-in-time survey results from Western countries in recent years, as well…
Is Democracy Possible
Anti-democratic thought is enjoying a resurgence with new claims of citizen incompetence, ignorance, and irrationality. While these claims have a long pedigree, they have become more widely held in a democratic age. They point to important insights concerning the limits of popular rule, although they are often based on misunderstandings or simple errors. Those that are valid are in any case already reflected in the institutions of democratic coun…
The Case for Colonialism
Political scientist and NAS board member Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism” (republished in Academic Questions in the summer of 2018), has been the subject of countless critical essays, conference panels, seminar discussions, and journal articles. Here Gilley responds to his critics
Coercing Climate Action
If states cannot cooperate to take action on climate change, they might begin to coerce one another to do so
North Louisiana. Volume One
Democracy
In Democracy Henry Adams depicted how a post-Civil War political leader succumbed to the pressures of emerging impersonal society. Adams also described the subtle appeal of political power and how it could undermine even well-intentioned persons. Adams's descriptions contain biographical overtones and foreshadow the complexities that inhibit modern political leaders
Jiang Zemin
Essay| September 01 1999 Jiang Zemin: On the Right Side of History? Bruce Gilley Bruce Gilley Bruce Gilley is a correspondent in Hong Kong for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of Tiger on the Brink: Jiang Zemin and China’s New Elite (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (1999) 98 (629): 249–253. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.1999.…
Eye of the Tiger
Tiger on the Brink
Model Rebels
China's Fourth Generation
China's New Rulers
At the Chinese Communist Party's 16th Congress in November 2002, a group of new leaders took over the world's most populous country. Their accession as the Fourth Generation of rulers of the People's Republic--following the generations of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin--signaled the end of a long, complex struggle for power. Yet little has been known outside high Party circles about either that struggle or the men who emerged victorio…
China's Changing of the Guard
The success of the recent leadership transition in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might be interpreted as evidence that China's authoritarian regime is historically unique. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist orders of Eastern Europe, the CCP not only remains in power but has installed a younger, better-educated, even more confident set of successors at its head. And the CCP's Sixteenth Party Congress in…
The "End of Politics" in Beijing
Against the concept of ethnic conflict
Despite a boom in studies of ethnic conflict, the empirical and conceptual justification for this field remains weak. Not only are claims of surging ethnic conflict unsubstantiated, but the concept itself is problematic. The concept tends to homogenise quite distinct political phenomena. Making valid causal inferences about ‘ethnic conflict’ is nearly impossible as a result, a shortcoming reflected in the un‐robust nature of the literature on the…
Asia's Giants
This edited volume reconsiders the conventional wisdom, which argues that comparative performance (in economic, social, political, as well as diplomatic arenas) of China has been superior to that of I
In China's Own Eyes
China's democratic future
Legitimacy Crisis
Since the dawn of time, it seems, social critics have been warning of a “crisis of legitimacy” in the political world. Manuel Castells repeats this ageless battle-cry in his 2004 Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture (PS, January 2005, 9–16), warning darkly of an “increasing alienation of citizens” that “threatens to undo the democratic system” (9). As proof, he offers an array of point-in-time survey results from Western countries in recent years, as well…
The New Antidemocrats
Elite-Led Democratization in China
A wide consensus among scholars of China holds that if democratization comes about, it will be through an elite-led process of change. In this scenario, popular pressures from below are a spur to action at the top but by means take its place. The evidence in support of this scenario in China is found in both the organizational capacity of the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP) and in the relative weakness of civil society and class pressures in…
One Country, Two Prisms
The Determinants of State Legitimacy
This article examines a range of potential causal variables of state legitimacy using a globally representative set of 72 countries accounting for 83 percent of the world’s population. Major theories of legitimacy determinants are advanced and tested using survey and expert data. Three variables (which measure good governance, democratic rights, and welfare gains) are then chosen from among all strongly correlated variables as being the most plau…
The meaning and measure of state legitimacy
This article presents a quantitative measurement of the political legitimacy of states in the late 1990s and early 2000s for 72 states containing 5.1 billion people, or 83 per cent of the world's population. First, the concept of state legitimacy is defined and justified. The definition includes the subjects, objects and sub‐types of legitimacy. A strategy to achieve replicable cross‐national measurements of legitimacy is then outlined and implem…
Thick or Thin
This note provides evidence about the relationship between state legitimacy and liberal rights in 72 states, and compares the strength of that relationship to other plausible legitimacy sources. It concludes that liberal rights have an equal but non‐superordinate status to good governance and material development. The ‘thick’ versus ‘thin’ argument about an appropriate global theory of state legitimacy may be misplaced. In its place, we should ad…
Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era
Is China Stuck
Is China Stuck? Bruce Gilley (bio) China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. By Minxin Pei. Harvard University Press, 2006. 306 pp. Amid a welter of books, conferences, and editorials on where China is heading, Minxin Pei has put forth a novel answer: nowhere. The gist of his argument is that the country's transition away from state control of the economy and totalitarian control of politics sputtered out after the 4 June…
Political Change In China
Comparing and Rethinking Political Change in China and Taiwan - B. Gilley. Civil Society and the State. The Evolution of Political Values - Y.H. Chu. Intellectual Pluralism and Dissent - M. Goldman and A. Esarey. Religion and the Emergence of Civil Society - R. Madsen. Business Groups: For or Against the Regime? - D.J. Solinger. Regime Responses. Responsive Authoritarianism - R.P. Weller. Developing the Rule of Law - R. Peerenboom and W. Chen. Co…
Legitimacy and Institutional Change
What explains the nature of institutional change in post-1989 China? Dominant theories of institutional change focus on economic-rationalist, sociopolitical, or historical causes. Yet they have trouble explaining the pattern of institutional change in China. An alternative legitimacy-based perspective is proposed here that provides a more parsimonious and general theory of institutional change for China and potentially for other cases as well
Political science (57 works) · Law (50 works) · Law (40 works) · Politics (40 works) · Sociology (36 works) · China (31 works) · Economics (29 works) · Political economy (28 works) · Democracy (23 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (19 works)