2020. "Refugee Perceptions toward Democratic Citizenship: A Narrative Analysis of North Koreans." Comparative Politics 52(3): 473-493. Debates on refugee integration often focus on the formal dimension of access and timing of naturalization.This article focuses on the equally important informal dimension: how, after a lifetime of authoritarianism, do naturalized refugees make sense of their newfound democratic roles and responsibilities? I identify the perceptual lenses that refugees use through a narrative analysis of North Korean refugees adapting to South Korea. A two-step discourse analysis of 31 personal narratives and 20 paired debates on topics about democratic citizenship (N=71) reveals a surprising phenomenon: for refugees who nationally identify with the host community, the behavioral scripts from authoritarian socialization can seed the beginnings of a duty-based approach to democratic citizen roles.
2020. "Citizen Duty and the Ethical Power of Communities: Mixed-method Evidence from East Asia." British Journal of Political Science 50(3): 1047-1065. What explains citizen duty, the sense of moral obligation to fulfill one's citizen roles in a democracy, even when coercion is weak and payoffs are uncertain? I show that citizen duty is rooted less in the specific culture or character of a people, and more in the national identity politics within a given democracy. Depending on the belief of representational linkage between "my" nation and the democratic state in which one lives, I show that the moral pull of the nation can either support or stunt a sense of citizen duty to contribute to that democracy. Based on a comparison of South Korea and Taiwan, a "most similar" pairing that contrasts in linkage for reasons of nationalist history, I trace this national effect on the citizen duty to vote using a mix of survey analysis and experiments.
2018. "Adapting to Democracy: National Identity and the Political Development of North Korean Defectors." Journal of East Asian Studies 18(1): 97-115. After defection from authoritarianism, what actually helps North Koreans adapt to democracy in South Korea? Prior scholarship has focused on economic factors such as resettlement aid and job assistance. This article uses an original political survey of North Korean refugees, which is rare, and finds that in fact, such economic factors pale in importance to a sense of co-national identification with South Koreans. The latter is a stronger predictor of the fledging duty to vote among North Koreans.
2017. "Is there an Intrinsic Duty to Vote? Comparative Evidence from East and West Germans." Electoral Studies 45: 55-62. Duty to vote is a consistent and strong predictor of turnout in surveys, but is it real? How can we distinguish between a sense of duty to vote as an intrinsic motivation versus extrinsically motivated cheap talk by those who already voted? By identifying and extending a key assumption about the D-term in Riker and Ordeshook's calculus of voting, I develop a statistical model of the duty to vote that can differentiate between its intrinsic versus extrinsic nature and test it in reunified Germany, which offers a compelling historical context.
2013. "Coding Voter Turnout Responses in the Current Population Survey." With Christopher Achen. Public Opinion Quarterly 77(4): 985-993. The CPS' Voting and Registration Supplement has long been the gold standard for American turnout surveys, but in the historic 2008 presidential election, it inaccurately estimated that turnout had slightly decreased. We show that an idiosyncratic Census coding rule and dramatically increasing non-response rates in the sample were responsible. To address this bias from overreport, we suggest that turnout scholars weight to actual state vote counts.
2011. "Civic Duty and Turnout in Japan and South Korea." With Christopher Achen. Korean Election Studies 1(2): 45-68. East Asian democracies typically have higher turnout rates in national elections than most advanced democracies, a phenomenon that is not well explained by conventional theories of turnout. We propose an alternative theory about the duty to vote and show that including this variable in turnout models, and modeling it in a way that accurately reflects its properties from political theory, significantly improves our understanding of the high turnout puzzle in Japan and South Korea.