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For the best doctoral dissertation completed and accepted in the previous year in the field of international relations, law, and politics.

Award Committee: Rawi Abdelal, Chair, Harvard University; Audie Klotz, Syracuse University; and Allan C. Stam, University of Michigan

Recipient: Jessica Chen Weiss, Yale University

Dissertation: “Powerful Patriots: Nationalism, Diplomacy, and the Strategic Logic of Anti-Foreign Protest”

Dissertation Chairs: David A. Lake and Susan Shirk, University of California, San Diego

Citation: We have unanimously selected Jessica Chen Weiss (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) as the winner of this year’s Helen Dwight Reid Award.  Her dissertation, “Powerful Patriots: Nationalism, Diplomacy, and the Strategic Logic of Anti-Foreign Protest,” builds effectively on scholarship about nationalisms, social movements, foreign policy, and international relations to explain how authoritarian governments are both constrained domestically and enabled in foreign relations by anti-foreign sentiment within their own societies.  In an original and insightful analysis, Dr. Weiss develops a theory of anti-foreign protest that emphasizes the incentives authoritarian governments have to cultivate a nationalist movement to gain bargaining leverage with other countries.  While scholarship on the ability of democratically elected governments to claim domestic, electoral constraints in international diplomacy has tended to assume that authoritarian governments lack such commitment devices, Dr. Weiss shows that anti-foreign social movements can serve similar purposes. 

Dr. Weiss applies her theory primarily to the foreign relations of the Chinese government, whose practices within China and abroad are central to world politics.  The Chinese government, Dr. Weiss shows, has played a delicate game by sometimes cultivating anti-foreign sentiment within a nationalist movement whose strength has ebbed and flowed during the past thirty years.  The delicacy derives from the fact that the official ideology of the ruling Communist party does not rely explicitly on nationalism, which could not only enhance the legitimacy of the government within China but also potentially serve as an alternate narrative for a new regime.  Although Chinese leaders have traditionally viewed independent social movements as a threat to regime stability, they also have found anti-foreign sentiment to be an effective commitment device when dealing with other major powers, including Japan and the United States.  Dr. Weiss thereby resolves the empirical puzzle of why the government cracked down on anti-Japanese protests in 1990 and 1996, but tolerated and even encouraged them in 1985 and 2005.  Similarly, the Chinese government permitted anti-American protests in 1999 and 2003, but repressed them in 2001.  Her compelling answer is that China’s bargaining position at those particular moments was strengthened by a vibrant nationalist movement.

The research for this dissertation is impressive.  Dr. Weiss collected and evaluated both quantitative and qualitative data collected over a year’s worth of field research comprised of interviews, as well as from an analysis of government documents, media coverage, and internet archives.  The dissertation is a model of mixed-method research, analytic theory-building, and nuanced analysis of the Chinese political and social context.  In sum, Dr. Weiss illuminates in her dissertation one of the most important dynamics in world politics: the risky, but strategic, balance between the Chinese government’s efforts to manage its domestic legitimacy and strengthen its bargaining position in world politics.  Hers is a most impressive contribution to our knowledge of nationalist movements, authoritarian governments, and international relations.