Income and Regime Support: Field-experimental Evidence from China's Stock Market.

The fate of a dictatorship is often linked to its economic performance. While the association has received some support in cross-national studies, it remains difficult to disentangle the effect of income from the manifold confounders that predict authoritarian durability. Existing individual-level studies suffer an overreliance on attitudinal evidence, and face equally acute challenges in causal inference. This paper provides evidence from a pilot study at the micro, behavioral level to buttress the causal link between income and regime support. Specifically, we post pro-regime slogans in a popular online forum in China that features lively discussions on the stock market among ordinary investors. Since each publicly listed company is assigned with a specific sub- forum, we are able to build a panel dataset that matches the daily comments on our posts in each sub-forum with the daily stock price for each specific firm. We find that negative income shocks, proxied with declines in stock prices, cause stock investors to speak critically of the regime and its leaders even in a heavily censored internet environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]