Publications

2025

1. Founding Leaders and National Narratives: Anthropomorphism and the Roots of Founding Leader Personality Cults in Three East Asian Cases

   Paul Schuler, Trung-Anh Nguyen, Yongfeng Tang, and Mohammad Khan

   Comparative Political Studies, 2025

   Abs DOI

   Founding leader personality cults are crucial components of national narratives. Yet, relatively little research examines how they emerge. A small political science literature argues that cults follow a personalization of power to dominate society and induce loyalty. We argue this conceptualization explains late-stage cults. We theorize that rival elites sometimes intentionally promote a leader’s image prior to personalization to generate emotional connections to the masses. We call these cults of legitimation. To explain why elites concede to cults that could erode their own power, we apply social psychology research to argue that personality cults can generate greater emotional attachment to an abstract group – in this case a nation – by anthropomorphizing it. Symbols alone are less powerful in this regard. Using Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, we process trace cult emergence to demonstrate the plausibility of our theory. Our paper provides a new perspective on a visible, undertheorized component of authoritarian rule.

2024

1. Historical Communist Party Strength and Modern Party Loyalty. A Replication Study of Barceló (PNAS, 2021)

   Edmund J. Malesky and Trung-Anh Nguyen

   Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, 2024

   Abs DOI

   Does exposure to violence create more politically engaged citizens? In a PNAS paper, Barceló (2021) asks this provocative question and proposes an intricate and original socio-psychological theory to answer it. Barceló also employs a research design that seeks to account for reverse causality to address the fact that more engaged places may have been targeted. Unfortunately, even after a correction, his statistical analysis remains dogged by coding, historical, and contextual errors, which bias results and lead to misleading conclusions. When we account for these mistakes with simple and reasonable corrections, the main results no longer hold. Rather, we show that the true underlying explanation is more mundane: areas that were sources of pre-war communist insurgency strength were targeted for their activity during the conflict, and they remain more loyal to the regime today.

2023

1. “We Never Really Talked about Politics”: Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces Structuring Information Disorder Within the Vietnamese Diaspora

   Sarah Nguyễn, Rachel E. Moran, Trung-Anh Nguyen, and Linh Bui

   Political Communication, Jul 2023

   Abs DOI

   This paper joins a growing effort within mis/disinformation research to better address the transnational spread of misinformation and, in particular, the impact of political mis/disinformation on historically marginalized and immigrant communities. While misinformation spreads across cultural, sociolinguistic, and geo-political contexts, it impacts communities differently according to preexisting power structures and information resources. Through focus groups with Vietnamese Americans across two generations and several geographic locations, we explore the complexities of misinformation within one such immigrant community. Findings highlight how a prevalence of intergenerational divides in political information seeking, lasting historical and political traumas of immigration, and language barriers underpin the saliency and impact of misinformation for Vietnamese Americans. Further, we explore how misinformation impacts political engagement, highlighting the consequences of misinformation at a familial and community-level. This research highlights the need for researchers of misinformation to better attend to the inequities of informational access and the vulnerabilities of already marginalized communities as targets of problematic information and information disorder.