Political Determinants of Covid-19 Mortality; Factional Politics in Vietnam; Rising Media Enclave Extremism

My dissertation consists of three independent projects. The first one investigates possible relationships between certain macro-systemic political variables and Covid mortality rates. Using multilevel modeling, I analyze countries’ trajectories of Covid mortality rates between March 2020 and January 2022. I found that countries with a federal system, on average, tend to have higher death rates than those in a unitary system. Democracy is found to be negatively associated with Covid mortality overall, but democracy’s effects on the trajectory of Covid rates depend on what subgroup of countries are considered. Government effectiveness persists as a significant factor that is negatively associated with Covid deaths. In countries where people have higher trust in government, the curves of death tolls tend to be flatter. The second project addresses the debate on authoritarian resilience with evidence from Vietnam. The dominant view in the debate focuses on political institutions and argues that institutions help dictators resolve “the problem of authoritarian power-sharing”. I test two main claims of this dominant view: institutions facilitate power access and rule-based power succession. I found that these processes are rather superficial in the case of Vietnam and show how the persistence of factional politics, coupled with the historical context of the country, are embedded in current politics. In contrast to the expectation of institutionalist scholars, top leaders were not bound by retirement age limits. Furthermore, evidence indicates that hometown ties constitute rigid political factions. The third project examines the rise of media enclave extremism, showing how it successfully mobilized a historically inactive ethnic population into the far-right circle. My research provides insight into the production side of media enclave extremism in an ethnic minority news outlet on the far-right, The Epoch Times. I conduct a discourse-historical analysis of its political news articles and identify two main discursive strategies. First, the outlet links their traditional enemy, the Chinese Communist Party, with US political entities such as the Democratic Party, Liberals, the mainstream media, and “bad” immigrants. Second, The Epoch Times groups itself with US right-wing media, “good” immigrants, naturalized citizens, and conservatives