Duke Kunshan University Professor Charles Chang has recently been awarded the 2024 James Caporaso Best Paper Award for his paper published in the journal Comparative Political Studies. The paper, co-authored with Harvard University Professor Yuhua Wang, is titled “The Reach of the State.” Building upon existing literature, their work conceptualizes the reach of the state and presents a novel measurement strategy to capture this reach.
About the Professor
Prof. Charles Chang is a computational social scientist who specializes in leveraging large-scale spatial data, especially those from smartphone social media. The Big Data he uses has helped him in the scientific measurement and causal identification of several social science and humanistic fields by drawing on data from a wide range of sources, including geospatial, textual, network, and visual information. His first book project, “Technologies Affecting Information Exchange in Contemporary China: Green Leap Forward?” examines how the physical environment of cities shapes political communication, a phenomenon that is previously thought only tightly controlled by a relentless authoritarian regime.
He encourages students to take INFOSCI 302 Urban Informatics and Sustainable Design, which is co-taught by Prof. Renee Richer.
About the Journal and the Award
Comparative Political Studies is a journal established in 1968. It is among the leading journals in methodology, theory, and research in the field of comparative politics, at both cross-national and intra-national levels. Publishing ten issues per year, the journal prides itself in its comprehensive coverage of diverse subjects pertaining to political science. The James Caporaso Best Paper Award is awarded annually to the most outstanding paper published in the journal in the previous year.
The Reach of the State
The article examines how the physical presence of the state helps the state project its power. State infrastructure, represented by buildings such as government offices and police stations, influences citizen behavior by signaling state interest. The empirical analysis conducted by the authors confirms this, suggesting that a crucial component of state power comes from the state’s visibility to citizens.
Furthermore, another contribution to the field of comparative politics is their dataset, which allows people to track changes in institutions across the entire territory of a country. It is based on firm-produced, street-level geo-survey and crowdsourcing data, which users can update in real time. Therefore, the geographical and temporal coverage is astounding and exhaustive. While the authors demonstrated their case in China, they suggest that similar data and analysis can be applied for other countries. They even provide an online tutorial to help researchers understand their code and apply it according to their needs.
Concluding Remarks
We congratulate Professor Charles Chang for his great achievement and contribution to the field of comparative politics. We look forward to seeing more of his work in the future, research that aligns with DKU’s global outlook and commitment to multidisciplinarity. His article can be reached by accessing the following link or QR code: https://journals-sagepub-com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/share/IHNGYBY2CV6E53NQPPBY?target=10.1177/00104140231194057
Written by: Eric Eberly, Class of 2028
Edited by: Prof. Charles Chang
