Associate Professor (PhD, MIT; BA, Cornell University)

Kai Quek studies strategic interactions in international relations, with a focus on US-China interactions.

He is especially interested in (1) state-to-state signaling, (2) the dynamics of deescalation, and (3) the origins of collective beliefs such as nationalism. His theoretical research on signaling has established new signaling mechanisms in political science. His research on deescalation pioneered the genre of real-world crisis management experimentation, by developing the first large-scale experiment in international security for managing a live real-world dispute. The experiment measured the nationalistic backlash leaders face for backing down in a territorial crisis, and tested strategies the government can use to reduce the backlash and decrease the risk of war.

He serves as Chair of the Departmental Postgraduate Research Committee, associate editor for the Japanese Journal of Political Science, and on the Board of Editors for International Organization.

CV: Link

Publications

Signaling, Information, War

• "Perspective Taking and Security Dilemma Thinking: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States” (with Ryan Brutger and Joshua Kertzer). World Politics (2024).
  Abstract   URLOne of the central challenges in China-US relations is the risk of a security dilemma between China and the United States, as each side carries out actions for what it perceives to be defensively motivated reasons, failing to realize how they are perceived by the other side. Yet how susceptible to the psychological biases that undergird the security dilemma are the Chinese and American publics? Can these biases' deleterious effects be mitigated? We explore the microfoundations of the security dilemma, fielding parallel dyadic cross-national survey experiments in China and the United States. We find microlevel evidence consistent with the logic of the security dilemma in publics in both countries. We also find that international relations (IR) scholars have overstated the palliative effects of perspective-taking, which can backfire in the face of perceived threats to actors' identities and goals. Our findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in China-US relations and perspective-taking in IR.
• "Managing the Costs of Backing Down: A “Mirror Experiment” on Reputations and Audience Costs in a Real-World Conflict” (with Shoko Kohama and Atsushi Tago). Journal of Politics (2024).
  Abstract   URLWhat are the consequences of backing down in a foreign crisis? Empirical research on this question has mostly focused on domestic audience costs in hypothetical crisis settings. Using experiments in Japan based on an ongoing real-world dispute between China and Japan, we investigate how domestic and international reputations as well as domestic support are affected by the leader backing down and the strategies used for backing down. We also test whether and how the strategies used by one leader to de-escalate a crisis might affect the rival state’s leader. We find that strategies that mitigated the domestic costs of backing down also reduced the reputational damage assessed by the domestic public. However, they generally did not change the international reputational damage imposed from outside. Leaders can reduce their domestic costs of backing down but are less able to do the same for their international audience costs.
• "Do States Really Sink Costs to Signal Resolve?” (with Dan Altman). Journal of Global Security Studies (2024).
  Abstract   URLSinking costs to signal resolve has become a vital part of how the field of international relations (IR) understands crisis bargaining. The logic of a resolved state “burning money” to distinguish itself from an unresolved state is well established in theory. But do states choose to sink costs and burn money in practice? We address the question on two fronts. First, we collect and analyze the examples of sinking costs in the mainstream IR literature. We find almost no clear-cut cases of sunk-cost signals. Second, we argue that this is because states typically prefer other signaling strategies. Rather than burning money, states can expend those resources more constructively. In particular, states can invest in improving the probability of victory in war (“balance tilting”), or they can downpay the costs of war. We conclude that balance tilting and downpaying costs plausibly explain a great deal of state behavior in peacetime, in crises, and even in wartime.
• "Relative Gains in the Shadow of a Trade War” (with Eddy S. F. Yeung). International Organization (2022).
  Abstract   URLWhen do people care about relative gains in trade? Much of the international relations (IR) scholarship—and much of the political rhetoric on trade— would lead us to expect support for a trade policy that benefits ourselves more than it benefits others. Yet, a large interdisciplinary literature also suggests the prevalence and importance of other-regarding preferences, rendering the conventional wisdom in IR contestable. We investigate whether and how relative gains influence trade preferences through an original survey experiment in the midst of the China-U.S. trade war. We find that relative gains shape trade opinion in a win-win scenario: people want to gain more than their foreign trade partner if both sides are gaining from trade. However, the relative-gains considerations are offset in a win-lose scenario where the other side is losing out. Relative-gains considerations causally affect opinion on trade, but not in a “beggar-thy-neighbor”—or even a “beggar-thy-rival”—situation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of relative gains in IR, and provide the first experimental evidence that relative-gains considerations can be offset by other-regarding preferences in international trade.
• "Untying Hands: Deescalation, Reputation, and Dynamic Audience Costs." The British Journal of Political Science (2022).
  Abstract   URLTwo states in a dispute refuse to back down. One ties its own hands to strengthen its stand and gain advantage; the other tries to untie the tied hands to preempt disadvantage. Tying hands is a well-studied strategy, but it tells only part of the story, and the response strategy of untying hands remains unexplored. Can a state untie the tied hands of its opponent to give freedom back to its opponent—the freedom to concede? I identify three strategies of untying hands: counterthreat, reassurance, and normative framing. I show experimentally that these strategies can reduce the public costs of backing down and the perceived reputational damage from backing down. Tied hands and audience costs are not static and immutable, but dynamic and malleable by the other side.
• "Four Costly Signaling Mechanisms." American Political Science Review (2021).
     — HKU Research Output Prize 2022
     — Applied in Research Report that triggered the OpenAI implosion in 2023:
      Report, New York Times, Tech News
  Abstract   URLTwo mechanisms of costly signaling are known in international relations: sinking costs and tying hands. I show that there exist four mechanisms of costly signaling that are equally general. I develop the new mechanisms of installment costs and reducible costs, and contrast them with sunk costs and tied-hands costs. I then conduct experiments to test the four signaling mechanisms. I find that each mechanism can improve credibility when the costs are high, but reducible costs can improve credibility even when the costs are low.
• "Authoritarian Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace" (with Mark Bell). International Organization (2018).
  Abstract   URL The “democratic peace”—the regularity that democracies rarely (if ever) fight with other democracies but do fight with nondemocracies—is one of the most famous findings in international relations scholarship. There is little agreement, however, about the mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Recently, scholars have shown that mass publics in liberal democracies are less supportive of using military force against other democracies. This finding has been taken to support the idea that the content of public opinion may provide one mechanism that underpins the democratic peace. Using a large-scale survey experiment, we show that mass publics in an authoritarian regime—China—show the same reluctance to use force against democracies as is found in western democracies. Our findings expand the empirical scope of the claim that mass publics are reluctant to use force against democracies, but force us to rethink how public opinion operates as a causal mechanism underpinning the democratic peace.
• "Can China Back Down? Crisis Deescalation in the Shadow of Popular Opposition" (with Alastair Iain Johnston). International Security (2018).
     — Featured in The Economist
     — Reprinted in Essential Readings in World Politics (WW Norton, 7th Edition)
  Abstract   URL Many analysts argue that public opinion creates pressure on Chinese leaders to act coercively in territorial disputes, and that it also limits their options to de-escalate once crises have broken out. Evidence suggests, however, that Chinese leaders may prefer having more flexibility rather than less in a crisis. Using original data generated by a survey experiment conducted in China in 2015, this article examines several strategies that Chinese leaders could use to reduce public pressure so as to make concessions in a crisis easier. These strategies include pledging to use economic sanctions instead of force; invoking China's “peaceful identity”; citing the costs of conflict to China's development; accepting United Nations mediation; and backing down in the face of U.S. military threats. In all cases except one, approval for the leader increases over a baseline level of support for making concessions. The exception is if the leader backs down in the face of U.S. military threats. Here, approval drops below the baseline level of support, especially for nationalists and hawks. The findings suggest that if one assumes that Chinese leaders are constrained by public opinion, a U.S. cost-imposition strategy to compel China to back down in crises may have the opposite effect—tying Chinese leaders' hands even tighter.
• "Type II Audience Costs." The Journal of Politics (2017).
  Abstract   URL Traditional audience costs are the political losses a leader incurs for backing down after threatening to fight (type I). Type II audience costs are the losses incurred for entering a conflict after promising not to fight. I develop the idea and decompose it experimentally into its constituents: an inconsistency cost plus the loss of a nonbelligerence dividend. Type II audience costs have deep implications, including the reversal of certain microfoundational challenges against type I audience costs in the context of type II audience costs, the credible signaling of a state’s resolve not to fight, and a reassurance mechanism with attractive properties.
• "Are Costly Signals More Credible? Evidence of Sender-Receiver Gaps." The Journal of Politics (2016).
  Abstract   URL The idea that costly signals are more credible is a long-standing hypothesis in international politics. However, little is known on how costly signaling actually works. Causal evidence is elusive because the effect of a costly signal is almost always confounded with the effects of other previous or simultaneous information. I design three controlled experiments to study how the logic of sinking costs operates. I find that signalers randomly assigned with high resolve are more likely to sink costs, but receivers do not acquiesce in line with signaler expectations, despite the sunk costs suffered. The logic of sunk-cost signaling is strong at the signaler’s end but not at the receiver’s end. There is a sender-receiver gap in how the same deterrence interaction is perceived at the two ends of the signaling mechanism, contrary to what the theory of costly signaling automatically assumes.
• "Nuclear Proliferation and the Use of Nuclear Options: Experimental Tests." Political Research Quarterly (2016).
  Abstract   URL The causes and prevention of nuclear war are critical to human survival but difficult to study empirically, as observations of nuclear war do not actually exist in the real world. The literature on nuclear war has remained largely theoretical as a consequence. To circumvent the observational constraint, this article investigates the impact of proliferation with laboratory-based nuclear-option games that experimentally manipulate the number of players (N) with a nuclear option. Results show that decisions are mostly peaceful in the dyadic N = 2 condition despite the existence of nuclear options with a relative first-strike advantage. However, a jump beyond N = 2 in the crisis interaction significantly sharpens the propensity to use the nuclear option. The findings highlight an avenue of research that evaluates mechanisms of nuclear war experimentally, moving research beyond the theoretical domain.
• "Rationalist Experiments on War." Political Science Research and Methods (2015).
  Abstract   URL Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan’s decisionmaking on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.
• "Discontinuities in Signaling Behavior Upon the Decision for War: An Analysis of China’s Prewar Signaling Behavior." International Relations of the Asia Pacific (2015).
  Abstract   URL There is always a time gap between the decision for war and its implementation. I exploit this time gap to study how the signaling of resolve changes after the decision for war is made, based on the wars that China fought since 1949. I study the series of signals that China sent after it had made its decisions for war in Korea (1950), India (1962) and Vietnam (1979), and compare them with the signals sent just before the decisions were made. I find patterns in Chinese prewar signaling that reflect how strategic incentives for the signaling of resolve change before and after the decision for war. The study generates theoretical expectations on discontinuities in signaling behavior upon the decision for war – an unexplored research area with direct policy implications.

China, Collective Beliefs, Belief Systems

• "Perspective Taking and Security Dilemma Thinking: Cross-National Experimental Evidence from China and the United States" (with Ryan Brutger and Joshua Kertzer). World Politics (2024).
• "Self-Reported Political Ideology” (with Eddy S. F. Yeung). Political Science Research and Methods (2024).
  Abstract   URLAmerican politics scholarship has relied extensively on self-reported measures of ideology. We evaluate these widely used measures through an original national survey. Descriptively, we show that Americans’ understandings of “liberal” and “conservative” are weakly aligned with conventional definitions of these terms and that such understandings are heterogeneous across social groups, casting doubt on the construct validity and measurement equivalence of ideological self-placements. Experimentally, we randomly assign one of three measures of ideology to each respondent: (1) the standard ANES question, (2) a version that adds definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” and (3) a version that keeps these definitions but removes ideological labels from the question. We find that the third measure, which helps to isolate symbolic ideology from operational ideology, shifts self-reported ideology in important ways: Democrats become more conservative, and Republicans more liberal. These findings offer first-cut experimental evidence on the limitations of self-reported ideology as a measure of operational ideology, and contribute to ongoing debates about the use of ideological self-placements in American politics.
• "Managing Nationalism: Experiments in China” (with Samuel Chan). Journal of Conflict Resolution (2024).
  Abstract   URLOne of the most urgent problems in politics today is to understand and manage nationalism. In particular, much attention is paid to the dangers of nationalism in China, but to date, there is little causal evidence on whether and how the government can rein in the anti-foreign sentiments of a nationalistic public. We fielded national survey experiments in China to evaluate the persuasion devices used by the government to contain anti-foreign sentiments. Through a novel “question-as-treatment” design, we identified their effectiveness in making citizens more likely to cooperate with a foreign rival at the operational level, even when they did not always change how people felt at the emotional level. The persuasion devices, however, were less effective on highly patriotic citizens, unless it was salient to them that the government was trying to persuade them. These results contribute a first set of causal evidence on whether anti-foreign sentiments can be contained by the Chinese government, and how.
• "The Sources of National Pride: Evidence from China and the United States ” (with Jiaqian Ni and Mengqiao Wang). Nations and Nationalism (2024).
  Abstract   URLNational pride relates to nationalism, one of the most powerful forces in modern politics. Many surveys have shown that most citizens are proud of their countries, but few have directly examined the underlying reasons for why people are proud of their countries. Using parallel national surveys in China and the United States, we investigate the sources and contents of national pride in the two most powerful nation-states in the world. Our results reveal clear differences between citizens in the two countries. While the sources of American national pride are largely ideational, the sources of Chinese national pride tend to be material. The evidence provides a first set of insights into the sources of national pride and challenges conventional depictions of nationalism as a monolithic concept.
• "What is a Patriot?” (with Eddy S. F. Yeung and Mengqiao Wang). Foreign Policy Analysis (2024).
  Abstract   URLPatriotism is a pervasive political force. However, not much is known about how people understand what it means to be “patriotic” in the first place. We conduct a cross-country study of mass understandings of patriotism. Through parallel national surveys in two global superpowers—China and the United States—we uncover the substantively different understandings of what it means to be “patriotic” between and within countries, and how the different understandings may map onto different policy preferences. In particular, while the literature draws a distinction between (benign) patriotism and (malign) nationalism, we find that most Chinese respondents—and about a third of American respondents—understand patriotism as nationalism. The nationalistic understanding of patriotism, in turn, corresponds to more hawkish foreign policy preferences. By unpacking folk intuitions about patriotism and mapping them onto existing scholarly debates, we bridge the distance between the academic literature and the mass political behavior it seeks to explain.
• "Reneging on Alliances: Experimental Evidence” (with Mark Souva and Weifang Xu). Research and Politics (2023).
  Abstract   URLTo what extent can democratic leaders mitigate the costs of reneging on alliance agreements? Previous research suggests that democratic leaders suffer from domestic backlash if they decide to renege on alliance treaties. However, less is known about whether and to what extent leaders can mitigate the domestic costs of reneging on alliance commitments. We study strategies leaders use to mitigate these costs. Specifically, we experimentally investigate whether and how much the costs of reneging are affected by different sidestepping strategies and the costs of fulfilling an alliance commitment. Results show that the potential costs of fulfilling commitments can dilute the domestic backlash for reneging on alliances, but various sidestepping strategies that work in the standard audience-cost context of reneging on a public threat do not work for reneging on a formal alliance. These findings expand our understanding of the reliability of democratic alliances and show that reneging costs are contingent on the context.
• "Asymmetrical Fairness in Trade Preferences” (with Injoo Sohn). Research and Politics (2023).
  Abstract   URLAsymmetric capacities across nations are a persistent reality in the global economy, but little is known about how people respond to these disparities. We provide the first experimental evidence on the phenomenon of asymmetrical fairness in trade preferences. We find that trade opinion divides over the relative economic capacity of the trade partner: Citizens treat smaller and less developed economies very differently in trade, even when the asymmetric treatment is disadvantageous to their own country. Across different experimental tests on a national sample in China, we find strong effects on trade opinion that are statistically and substantively significant. We also show that asymmetrical fairness is a phenomenon that applies in both positive (gains) and negative (losses) domains. Thus, while International Relations scholarship often assumes self-centered actors seeking benefits for themselves or their national in-groups, our results show that prosocial considerations over the limited capacities of the weak can influence the preferences of the strong—a phenomenon that refines our understanding of international power asymmetry and its consequences.
• "Conditioning China’s Influence: Intentionality, Intermediaries, and Institutions” (with Courtney Fung, Enze Han, and Austin Strange). Journal of Contemporary China (2022).
  Abstract   URLAccording to popular accounts, China’s international influence is increasing in stride with China’s growing material capabilities. However, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated gaps between China’s power and its influence. Building on earlier research, we argue that these gaps are often a result from neglecting basic features of the actors and host societies that condition China’s net influence. We propose an inclusive approach to conceptualizing and measuring China’s influence abroad–one that conditions China’s net influence on three dimensions. First, intentionality distinguishes between intentional influence-seeking and influence that accrues unintentionally via influence externalities. Second, we argue that more systematic treatment of Chinese intermediaries–the diverse set of substate actors operating overseas–is needed in order to expand the study of Chinese influence beyond state-level behavior. Finally, domestic institutions in host countries are essential conduits for conditioning how the behavior of different Chinese actors, as well as reactions by groups and individuals within host countries, are aggregated up to the policy level.
• "Public Attitudes on Foreign and Internal Migration: Evidence from China" (with David Andrew Singer). Public Opinion Quarterly (2022).
  Abstract   URL We explore attitudes toward internal and foreign migration in China using an original survey experiment. If labor market competition drives attitudes, then residents will be opposed to migrants with comparable skill levels, regardless of migrant origin. If residents fear a dilution of national identity, then they will be more opposed to foreign than internal migration. We conduct a national survey in Mainland China where we randomly assign respondents to answer questions about migrants with different skill levels and from either foreign countries or other provinces in China. We find that attitudes cleave over skill level, but the foreign-internal dimension is, on its own, not a salient cleavage in preferences. However, when considering high-skilled migrants, respondents are more supportive of foreign than internal migration; when considering low-skilled migrants, they are more opposed to foreign than internal migration. The results cast doubt on material explanations for attitudes toward migration and suggest a reevaluation of cultural threat arguments that privilege national borders.
• "Guns and Butter in China: How Chinese Citizens Respond to Military Spending" (with Xiao Han and Michael Sadler). China Quarterly (2020).
     — Featured in The Washington Post
  Abstract   URL Militaries are sustained by public money that is diverted away from other domestic ends. How the public react to the “guns-versus-butter” trade-off is thus an important question in understanding the microfoundations of Chinese military power. However, there are few studies on public attitudes towards military spending in China, whose rising power has been a grave concern to many policymakers around the world. We fielded a national online survey to investigate the nature of public support for military spending in China. We find that Chinese citizens support military spending in the abstract, but their support diminishes when considered alongside other domestic spending priorities. We also find that public support for military spending coexists surprisingly with anti-war sentiments and a significant strain of isolationism. In addition, while the conventional wisdom suggests that nationalism moves a state towards bellicosity and war, we find that Chinese citizens with a stronger sense of national pride report stronger anti-war sentiments than other citizens.
• "Violence Exposure and Support for State Use of Force in a Non-Democracy" (with Yue Hou). Journal of Experimental Political Science (2019).
     — Best JEPS Article Award, American Political Science Association
  Abstract   URL How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.
• "Authoritarian Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace" (with Mark Bell). International Organization (2018).
• "Can China Back Down? Crisis Deescalation in the Shadow of Popular Opposition" (with Alastair Iain Johnston). International Security (2018).
• "Discontinuities in Signaling Behavior Upon the Decision for War: An Analysis of China’s Prewar Signaling Behavior." International Relations of the Asia Pacific (2015).
• "Closeness Counts: Increasing Precision and Reducing Errors in Mass Election Predictions" (with Michael Sances). Political Analysis (2015).
     — Adopted by the American National Election Study (ANES) 2016
  Abstract   URL Mass election predictions are increasingly used by election forecasters and public opinion scholars. While they are potentially powerful tools for answering a variety of social science questions, existing measures are limited in that they ask about victors rather than voteshares. We show that asking survey respondents to predict voteshares is a viable and superior alternative to asking them to predict winners. After showing respondents can make sensible quantitative predictions, we demonstrate how traditional qualitative forecasts lead to mistaken inferences. In particular, qualitative predictions vastly overstate the degree of partisan bias in election forecasts, and lead to wrong conclusions regarding how political knowledge exacerbates this bias. We also show how election predictions can aid in the use of elections as natural experiments, using the effect of the 2012 election on partisan economic perceptions as an example. Our results have implications for multiple constituencies, from methodologists and pollsters to political scientists and interdisciplinary scholars of collective intelligence.

Selected Conferences

• "What is a Signal?" Paper for the Pacific International Politics Conference (2023).
• "Win-Win Deescalation" (with John Koo). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2023).
• "Reputations in Interaction" (with John Koo). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2022).
• "Do States Signal Resolve by Sinking Costs?" (with Dan Altman). Paper for the International Studies Association Annual Conference (2021).
• "Mnemonic Conflict Reconciliation." Paper for the Pacific International Politics Conference (2020).
• "Are Costly Signals Perceived Asymmetrically?" Paper for the Pacific International Politics Conference (2019).
• "The Existence of Four Costly Signaling Mechanisms." Paper for the Pacific International Politics Conference (2018).
• “International Credibility Cost: An Experimental Investigation” (with Xiao Han and Michael Sadler). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2018).
• "Heterogeneous Chinese Nationalism" (with Erin Baggott and Alastair Iain Johnston). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2017).
• "Security Dilemma Thinking: Evidence from a Cross-National Experiment in China and the United States" (with Ryan Brutger and Joshua Kertzer). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2017).
• "Crisis Management in the Shadow of Audience Costs" (with Alastair Iain Johnston). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2016).
• "Understanding Chinese International Kindness: A National Experiment" (with Zenobia Chan). Paper for the International Studies Association Annual Conference (2016).
• "Rally Around the Red Flag: Terror Shocks and Nationalism in China" (with Yue Hou). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2015).
• "Realism, Idealism, and American Public Opinion on Nuclear Disarmament" (with Mark Bell). Paper for the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (2015).

Monograph

• "Rationalist Causes of War: Mechanisms, Experiments, and East Asian Wars." Thesis (2013). (Committee: Kenneth Oye, James M. Snyder, Stephen Van Evera)