Anti-Extradition Protests and Decaying Institutional Trust in Hong Kong (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Protest, Democracy, and Autonomy: The Case of Hong Kong

Abstract

Does more repression help strengthen or weaken authoritarian institutions of social cooptation under dictatorships? The literature of comparative authoritarianism has provided us with rich theoretical and empirical insights on how these two strategies in dictators’ toolkit work to enhance regime stability individually, but their interactions still remain relatively under-studied. This paper tries to answer this question by taking advantage of a recent natural experiment in Hong Kong when Beijing passed the National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020 to repress dissidents’ protest mobilization. Since the handover in 1997, Hong Kong has become China’s special administrative region and been governed under an ad-hoc framework of “One Country, Two Systems.” Under the Basic Law, the framework has thus created a hybrid regime in Hong Kong where, on the one hand, new authoritarian institutions such as legislature (i.e., the LegCo) and indirect elections for the Chief Executive (the head of the government) are adopted, and several British legacies such as the rule of law and judicial independence also co-exist on the other. Absent any meaningful checks and balances in this design, before the Anti-Extradition Movement arose in June 2019, the cohabitation of the “two systems” was in fact self-enforcing largely owing to Hong Kongers’ collective action ability to organize massive demonstrations each time when the Hong Kong government tried to change the status quo. Based on this idea, we therefore argue theoretically that the repressive effect of the NSL on dissenters’ political mobilization would simply undermine, instead of consolidating, Hong Kong’s authoritarian institutions and make them stop being self-enforcing any longer. Empirically, this study taps into the two recent surveys we conducted in Hong Kong right before and after the NSL’s passage in early June, an external shock unexpected by almost every Hong Konger. We found that while the NSL (along with the COVID-19) did raise the political/ legal costs of contentious collective actions to such an extent that no large protests had ever been witnessed since its adoption, Hong Kongers’ institutional trust also plunged under a more repressive regime. Our findings not only help assess the NSL’s causal effect on Hong Kong’s institutional trust, but also contributes to a dynamic understanding of authoritarian institutions where people’s trust in them decays in a more repressive hybrid regime.

Author

• Hans Hanpu Tung, National Taiwan University