What explains the popularity of authoritarian leaders? The conventional wisdom is that autocrats earn support by promoting economic growth. In When People Want Punishment, Lily Tsai makes a provocative argument: Authoritarian leaders become popular when they punish corrupt officials, criminals, and other wrongdoers. This is effective because citizens care about “retributive justice, or the use of punishment to uphold what is fair and right” (p. 6, emphasis in original).
Although the book largely focuses on local leaders in China, Tsai illustrates how authoritarian leaders around the world use the public’s yearning for retribution to build political support. From Rodrigo Duterte’s violent “war on crime” in the Philippines to Xi Jinping’s anticorruption crackdown in China, strongmen around the world exploit a popular desire for punishment to strengthen political support.
Tsai’s development of the concept of retributive justice is likely to be agenda-setting. Chapter 2 of the book provides a clear and useful conceptual discussion of retributive justice and explains how it differs from related concepts including distributive justice, procedural justice, and revenge. While the concept of retributive justice is not new, it is ripe for deeper exploration by political scientists, as the many examples in Tsai’s book show.
Linking retributive justice to authoritarian popularity helps to move the literature on authoritarian politics beyond the familiar idea that authoritarian popularity rests on economic growth alone. In doing so, it helps to explain puzzling behavior by some autocrats. For example, recent research suggests that Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign may weaken support for the regime, presumably because it draws attention to the lavish lifestyles of some ruling party officials (see Yuhua Wang and Bruce J. Dickson, “How Corruption Investigations Undermine Regime Support: Evidence From China,” Political Science Research and Methods 10 [1], 2022). Tsai’s theory explains why it is in Xi’s personal interest to continue a campaign that burnishes his personal political brand, even if it may undermine support for the regime in general.
Xi Jinping is hardly the first Chinese leader to rely on desire for retributive justice to bolster his personal popularity. In chapter 3, Tsai turns to an absorbing discussion of the historical uses of retributive justice in China. In imperial China, successive emperors established themselves as the guardians of moral order by punishing corrupt officials. In the Mao era, the Communist Party encouraged “struggle sessions” in which the groups targeted local cadres and other victims for public criticism and sometimes violent attack; the sense that these struggle sessions produced justice helped to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime.
However, the empirical core of Tsai’s book, presented in chapters 4 and 5, is less concerned with how elite leaders like Mao become popular, and instead focuses on local leaders in China.
To understand the everyday political concerns of people in rural China, Tsai conducted “open-ended, in-depth” (p. 104) interviews with dozens of households, some of which she reinterviewed up to three times. The open-ended interviews guided Tsai toward the notion that retributive justice is important. In the interviews, citizens frequently repeated narratives about the virtues of officials who punish wrongdoers and expressed nostalgia for Mao-era practices of retributive justice. The interview evidence is a model of careful qualitative research design that should be emulated by others and studied in courses on qualitative fieldwork.
To probe the implications of these qualitative findings, Tsai next conducted a series of survey experiments. The experiments use a conjoint design, in which respondents have a choice between two hypothetical candidates for a local office, such as township party secretary. As with the qualitative evidence, the survey experiments are a model of careful execution: Tsai uses an in-person household survey and takes steps to ensure the design is easily understood by respondents.
The survey experiments show that citizens prefer officials who punish corruption over those who do not. This is not especially surprising: More interesting is why this is the case. Do citizens approve of officials who punish corruption because of moral concerns? Or because punishing corruption demonstrates competence? A clever mediation analysis design suggests that respondents focus on moral concerns (although the assumptions needed for the mediation analysis to be valid are quite strong).
To examine whether the patterns found in the qualitative evidence and survey experiments hold more broadly, in chapter 5 Tsai uses observational data from across China—and, remarkably, from an original survey experiment involving respondents in 50 countries around the world. In the surveys in China, Tsai finds that when respondents are aware that local officials have performance contracts with penalties, they are more satisfied with officials’ performance, are more willing to contribute to public works, and are more likely to believe that officials share their values. In the cross-national experiment, respondents primed with a reminder about the “investigative and punitive functions of the anti-corruption agency in their respective country” (p. 185) have higher tax morale than those who are not primed with this reminder.
This is a rich and persuasive book that develops an interesting, big idea. The book’s admirable brevity also leaves open some avenues for future research. First, the empirical sections of the book mostly focus on how citizens in China perceive local leaders. There is less evidence showing how national leaders like Xi Jinping use the desire for retributive justice to build support. Examining national-level politics is a natural next step in this important research agenda.
In addition, future research on retributive justice might develop new ways to operationalize the core concept and measure it. The quantitative portions wrestle with how to measure key ideas and operationalize them in survey experiments. For example, when citizens are primed to recall the existence of anticorruption agencies or cadre performance contracts, does this play on a desire for retributive justice? Or does it capture something else, like a desire for competent government?
Overall, When People Want Punishment is an important work that makes for a fascinating sequel of sorts to Tsai’s first book, Accountability without Democracy. In both books, Tsai examines how officials build moral authority, but the implications are quite different.
In Accountability without Democracy, Tsai examined how officials in rural China build moral authority within their groups by doing good works: by helping to mend leaky schoolhouse roofs, digging wells with clean water, and paving dirt roads. The book suggested that strong community institutions and a desire for moral authority can encourage officials to behave in ways that benefit the poor, even in the absence of strong formal institutions of accountability.
In When People Want Punishment, by contrast, officials build moral authority by satisfying a popular hunger for punishment. The implications about human nature are seemingly darker. As Tsai notes in the book’s closing pages, many people “would rather have benevolent dictators that seem to respond to these needs than dirty democrats who seem unaware of them” (p. 215).
