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Statistical Misreporting: The View from (Very) High Above

Virtual

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The East Asia Program at the Moynihan Institute presents Minh Duc Trinh from Purdue University. 

Autocrats govern from the top but are dependent on information from below. However, regime agents at lower levels of government who supply this information have both the incentive and capacity to manipulate it, faking government data and statistics to appear more competent and loyal than they really are. This statistical misreporting problem becomes even more pervasive and more consequential in regimes that rely on data and statistics in their decision making, but even regime rulers are unable to tell exactly which of their agents are lying and by how much. A novel method based on nighttime luminosity succeeded in quantifying the degree of statistical misreporting in Vietnam and China, two surviving (and thriving) single-party Communist regimes in Asia. Knowledge about disaggregated misreporting behaviors then shed light on statistical misreporting’s debilitating effects on authoritarian governance. 

Minh Trinh is an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University. A scholar of comparative politics, Trinh studies the inner workings of durable authoritarian regimes. His primary research focuses on the falsification of government statistics and its impact on authoritarian governance at the highest level. Another research agenda explores the origins of citizens’ voluntary compliance to authoritarian rule at the bottom. Trinh received a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was previously at the Weatherhead Center, Harvard University, as a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow.


Category

Social Science and Public Policy

Type

Virtual

Region

Virtual

Open to

Public

Cost

Free

Organizer

MAX-East Asia Program

Contact

Matt Baxter
315.443.2553

Mhbaxter@syr.edu

Accessibility

Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART)

Contact Matt Baxter to request additional accommodations

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