ASEAN Institute Seminar Series: Community-Minded Communists: A Field Experiment on Party Member Propensity for Community Activism in Among Rural Vietnamese Women
Are party members in single-party regimes more community-minded than non-party members? Understanding who joins authoritarian parties has important implications for authoritarian party durability and legitimacy. Parties able to recruit the community-minded may be viewed with greater trust. We argue that mass-based authoritarian parties successfully attract more community-minded citizens. We test our theory using a behavioral recruitment experiment for women in two rural districts in Vietnam and find that party members are ten percentage points more likely to join a training program when primed by collective incentives than non-party members. By contrast, party members are less likely to join when incentivized with selective incentives. A follow-up charity experiment shows that those in the community-incentive treatment group donate more to charity, further suggesting community-mindedness at work. The theory and findings could explain citizen trust in Vietnam’s single-party regime and speak to a broader alternative pathway to single-party regime legitimacy.
Date: 12 February 2025, 17:00
Venue: St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details: Syndicate Room
Speaker: Dr Quynh Nguyen (University of Bern)
Organising department: Oxford School of Global and Area Studies
Organiser: Professor Jacob Ricks (Singapore Management University)
Organiser contact email address: charlotte.guillain@area.ox.ac.uk
Host: Professor Jacob Ricks (Singapore Management University)
Part of: ASEAN Institute Seminar Series 2025
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Charlotte Guillain