Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.     

Eliciting Risk Attitudes in the Field: Surveys or Experimental Methods? An Empirical Comparison in Rural Niger

We compare several risk preference elicitation methods – including incentivised, non-incentivised, and framed methods as well as a traditional Likert survey question – in a developing country and empirically test how well consequent measures of risk attitudes predict risk taking behaviour. We find that Likert scale and non-incentivised framed survey questions are not sufficient substitutes for costlier incentivised methods in rural Niger. Instead, the incentivised framed question works best while a simplified incentivised lottery question works almost as well. More risk and ambiguity averse farmers are less likely to adopt fertiliser microdosing indicating the importance of insurance and strategies to promote learning.