Research

Since the late 1990s, an increasing number of countries have turned to “illiberal democracy,” a regime that maintains “free but unfair” elections while systematically undermining the rule of law. In this paper, we argue that modern illiberal democracies cause detrimental effects on research. Using both national and international bibliometric data, we compare researchers exposed to illiberal policies in Hungary with their peers in other Central European countries prior to and after the first re-election of Viktor Orbán in 2010. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly shift their publication efforts toward national-language journals with lower quality and are more likely to leave the country altogether. We show that political pressure is a key driver of these effects: researchers experience radically different patterns in terms of research outcomes depending on their political alignment. Researchers perceived as political opponents are more negatively impacted in both their publication output and in collaboration networks, decreasing them both by about a quarter of the pre-shock value per year. Yet, they are more likely to publicly criticize the regime. Finally, researchers working on topics related to gender issues are also more affected and experience a decrease of 10% of their total publications and of 30% of their publications in top journals.

In this paper, I empirically study the effect of administrative autonomy on the productivity of public sector institutions. I take the 2007 French university reform as a case study of administrative reorganisation of a public system and decompose its components to assess their different effects. The context allows me to distinguish the effect of administrative autonomy to universities, competition for grants, and mergers into larger institutions while keeping rigid funding schemes relatively stable. Using bibliometric data, I first compare mobility flows in treated institutions for each treatment to those in never-treated institutions. I then compare the quantity and quality of publications of researchers affiliated at treated institutions and researchers affiliated at never-treated institutions. I find that administrative autonomy itself, when not coupled with reforms in funding, does not lead to higher attractiveness of French universities either in France or the rest of the world, and causes negative effects on research quality of French researchers, leading to a drop of about 6% in citations. Conversely, university mergers lead to an increase in arrivals of researchers from abroad of 18%. Receiving a competitive grant and merging into a larger university also improves the productivity of their employees, but not sufficiently to offset the effect of administrative reorganisation. Simply allowing public institutions to compete in terms of output and hiring but not for funding does not improve efficiency.

Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative was meant to “protect US intellectual property and technologies against Chinese Economic Espionage”. In practice, it made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In this paper we use informa tion from the Scopus database to analyze how the China Initiative shock affected the volume, quality and direction of Chinese research. We find a negative effect of the Initiative on the average quality of both the publications and the co-authors of Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations. Moreover, this negative effect has been stronger for Chinese researchers with higher research productivity and/or who worked on US-dominated fields and/or topics prior to the shock. Finally, we find that Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations reallocated away from US coauthors after the shock and also towards more basic research.