PIPC Online Speaker Series

The Pacific International Politics Conference now presents it's first online speaker series (PIPCOSS)!

Please join us Eik Swee (University of Melbourne) and Hui-Pei Cheng (Soochow University)as present- “Farewell President! Political Favoritism, Economic Inequality, and Political Polarization" via ZOOM. Please see below for date and time. Register here to attend!

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in partiality. We find that Chiang's nationalist regime conducted political favoritism broadly toward political immigrants via cronyism (allocating public sector positions) and also differentially toward specific subgroups of political immigrants via wage discrimination (offering higher payroll to these subgroups within the public sector). Favoritism led to a 7.2 percent immigrant payroll premium, which accounted for nearly three quarters of the immigrant-native payroll gap at the time. This in turn propelled overall income inequality by 4.5 percent. Moreover, political favoritism breeds political polarization in the long run by pulling apart the political views of immigrants and natives. Compared with natives, immigrants who were exposed to favoritism tend to adopt political positions that are aligned with the nationalist party today: they are more likely to support unification with China, and are more inclined to trust the mainland Chinese government and its citizens. Exposed immigrant (native) swing voters are also more (less) likely to vote for the nationalist party today.

Time and Date:

August 19th, 6 pm (PST)

August 20th, 11 am (Australia, Canberra)

August 20th, 10 am (Japan, South Korea)

August 20th, 9 am (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore)