Peer Reviewed Publications
Gruffydd-Jones, J. J. (2025) Call Me By Your Name: The Impacts of American Human Rights Violations in Authoritarian States. British Journal of Political Science, 55(e51)
When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.
Gruffydd-Jones, J. J. (2021) International Attention and the Treatment of Political Prisoners. International Studies Quarterly. 65(4), 999-1011
Does international attention to political prisoners make them more likely to be released? The political science literature provides theoretical reasons to believe that widely publicizing a case may make regimes both more and less likely to free their prisoners, but to date there has been no systematic examination of this issue. An analysis of political prisoners in China from 1994 to 2017 shows that international publicity of a political prisoner's case will make regimes 70 percent more likely to release them early before sentencing, but has no effect once the prisoner has been sentenced—and may even be counterproductive. This “resistance” to international efforts appears to be more closely related with demonstrating the regime's strength to an international audience rather than to a domestic one. The study shows how fine-grained data on individuals can illuminate the domestic mechanisms behind why states comply with or resist transnational activism and human rights diplomacy.
Gruffydd-Jones, J. J. (2019) Citizens and Condemnation: Strategic use of International Human Rights Pressure in Authoritarian States. Comparative Political Studies, 52(4), 579-612
Governments with strict control over the information that their citizens hear from foreign sources are regular targets of human rights pressure, but we know little about how this information matters in the domestic realm. I argue that authoritarian regimes strategically pass on certain types of external pressure to their public in order to ‘geopoliticise’ human rights violations, making citizens view human rights in terms of defending their nation internationally rather than in terms of individual violations, and more likely to be satisfied with their government’s behaviour. I find strong support for this model through statistical analysis of Chinese state media reports of external human rights pressure and a survey experiment on Chinese citizens’ responses to pressure on women’s rights. This analysis demonstrates that authoritarian regimes may be able to manipulate international human rights diplomacy to help them retain the support of their population while suppressing their human rights.
Does an upsurge in nationalism make interstate conflict more likely? This article gives evidence to suggest that spikes in nationalism do have a direct impact on the likelihood of disputes between states. In it, I use national days or anniversaries as occasions that increase the salience of a national identity and its historical wars. I show that in the two months following national days, conflict is markedly higher than would be expected—almost 30 percent more likely than the rest of the year—and particularly likely for states who initiate conflict or who have revisionist intentions. I demonstrate further how nationalist sentiment can increase international tensions with a case study of national anniversaries in China and Japan. Together, this evidence suggests that the increase in nationalism around national days provides both risks and opportunities to regimes and shapes when they choose conflict over cooperation in international relations.
How does the international human rights community affect the likelihood of democratization? Scholarship on Chinese citizens’ preferences about their political system has not explored the importance of the external environment, perhaps surprising given the extensive foreign pressure on China’s authoritarian system over the last 30 years. I use a quasi-natural experiment around the meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama in 2011 to examine the impact of foreign pressure on citizens’ perceptions of democracy in China in real time. I show that the meeting significantly increased the Chinese public’s belief that their country is democratic, with those of above average patriotism over 11 percentage points more likely to believe China is democratic in the five days following the meeting than before. The findings suggest that some kinds of external pressure may help to increase satisfaction with authoritarian rule, ultimately boosting autocrats’ ability to hold on to power.
Media
“Why Human Rights Criticism Backfires”. Foreign Policy (2022)
"Western nations sanctioned China. Chinese media made the most of the criticism". The Washington Post - Monkey Cage (2021)
"How Monday's England-Slovakia soccer match might just influence Brexit". The Washington Post - Monkey Cage (2016)
In Progress
Sinoscepticism, Sinophobia, and Anti-Americanism: Resistance to Global Powers
British public opinion towards China in a changing world
Anti-Americanism and US-China rivalry: A conjoint experiment
How government repression affects attitudes towards other ethnic groups
Foreign criticism and news preference in authoritarian states
