Research

I study political communication, media, and authoritarian politics, with a focus on China. Using experimental and computational methods with large-scale data on political activity, I answer questions about how technology structures censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation, and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.

Book

Pan, Jennifer. 2020. Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers. New York: Oxford University Press (Amazon)

Publications

Fan, Yingjie, Jennifer Pan, and Yiqing Xu. 2026. “Selection, stability, and shock: political attitudes of Chinese students at home and abroad.” British Journal of Political Science Forthcoming.

with Olivier Bergeron-Boutin, Brendan Nyhan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Magdalena Wojcieszak, et al. 2026. “Untrustworthy sources on Facebook and Instagram in 2020: Concentrated exposure but no attitudinal effects.” Science Advances 12(31). (Link, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, and Xu Xu. 2026. “Political censorship in large language models originating from China.” PNAS Nexus 5(2). (PDF, SI, Replication)

Appel, Ruth E., Young Mie Kim, Jennifer Pan, Yiqing Xu, Ben Nimmo, Daniel Robert Thomas, et al. 2026. “How deceptive online networks reached millions in the US 2020 elections.” Nature Human Behaviour 10: 1068-1082. (PDF, SI, Replication)

with Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, and Ro’ee Levy. 2026. “The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election.” Nature Human Behaviour 5: 884-895. (Link, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, Xu Xu, and Yiqing Xu. 2026. “Disguised repression: targeting opponents with non-political crimes to undermine dissent.” Journal of Politics 88(1). (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

with Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Benjamin Wittenbrink, et al. 2025. “The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users’ emotional state.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. (Link, Replication)

Lu, Yingdan, Jennifer Pan, Xu Xu, and Yiqing Xu. 2025. “Decentralized propaganda in the era of digital media: the massive presence of the Chinese state on Douyin.” American Journal of Political Science, 70(3): 990-1006. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, and Yiqing Xu. 2025. “Gauging preference stability under authoritarianism.” Research & Politics 12(4). (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Hanley, Hans W. A., Yingdan Lu, and Jennifer Pan. 2025. “Across the firewall: foreign media’s role in shaping Chinese social media narratives on the Russo-Ukrainian War.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(1). (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Fisher, Jillian, Shangbin Feng, Robert Aron, Thomas Richardson, Yejin Choi, Daniel W. Fisher, Jennifer Pan, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Katharina Reinecke. 2025. “Biased AI can influence political decision-making.” ACL 2025 (Oral). (Link)

Fisher, Jillian, Ruth E. Appel, Chan Young Park, Yujin Potter, Liwei Jiang, Taylor Sorensen, Shangbin Feng, Yulia Tsvetkov, Margaret E. Roberts, Jennifer Pan, Dawn Song, and Yejin Choi. 2025. “Political neutrality in AI is impossible—but here is how to approximate it.” ICML 2025 (Oral). (Link)

with Sandra González-Bailón and David Lazer. 2024. “The diffusion and reach of (mis)information on Facebook during the U.S. 2020 election.” Sociological Science 11: 1124-1146. (Link, Replication)

Fan, Yingjie, Jennifer Pan, and Tongtong Zhang. 2024. “Gender and political compliance under authoritarian rule.” Comparative Political Studies 58(9): 1890-1929. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

DeButts, Matt, and Jennifer Pan. 2024. “Reporting after removal: the effects of journalist expulsion on foreign news coverage.” Journal of Communication 74(4): 273-286. (PDF, Replication)

Dahlke, Ross, and Jennifer Pan. 2024. “January 6 arrests and media coverage do not remobilize conservatives on social media.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(23). (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

DeButts, Matt, and Jennifer Pan. 2024. “China’s internet controls: what if citizens disengage?” Communication and the Public 9(4): 431-435. (PDF)

with Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow. 2024. “The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: a deactivation experiment.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(21). (Link, Replication)

Appel, Ruth E., Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2023. “Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts.” Science Advances 9(44). (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Guess, Andrew, Neil Malhotra, Jennifer Pan, Pablo Barberá, et al. 2023. “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?” Science 381(6656): 398-404. (Link, Replication)

Guess, Andrew, Neil Malhotra, Jennifer Pan, Pablo Barberá, et al. 2023. “Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions.” Science 381(6656): 404-408. (Link, Replication)

with Sandra González-Bailón and David Lazer. 2023. “Asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on Facebook.” Science 381(6656): 392-398. (Link, Replication)

with Brendan Nyhan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, and Magdalena Wojcieszak. 2023. “Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing.” Nature 620(7972): 137-144. (Link, Replication)

Fan, Yingjie, Jennifer Pan, and Jaymee Sheng. 2023. “Strategies of Chinese state media on Twitter.” Political Communication 41(1): 4-25. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Lu, Yingdan, Jack Schaefer, Kunwoo Park, Jungseock Joo, and Jennifer Pan. 2022. “How information flows from the world to China.” International Journal of Press/Politics 29(2): 305-327. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Earl, Jennifer, Thomas V. Maher, and Jennifer Pan. 2022. “The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: a synthetic review.” Science Advances 8(10): 1-15. (PDF)

Muise, Dan, Yingdan Lu, Jennifer Pan, and Byron Reeves. 2022. “Homogenized and localized: a comparison of moment-by-moment smartphone usage patterns in diverse contexts.” Mobile Media & Communication 10(3): 487-509. (PDF)

Lu, Yingdan, and Jennifer Pan. 2021. “The pervasive presence of Chinese government content on Douyin trending videos.” Computational Communication Research 4(1): 68-98. (PDF, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, and Tongtong Zhang. 2021. “Does ideology influence hiring in China? Evidence from two randomized experiments.” Political Science Research and Methods 11(1): 63-79. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, Zijie Shao, and Yiqing Xu. 2021. “How government-controlled media shifts policy attitudes through framing.” Political Science Research and Methods 10(2): 317-332. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Lu, Yingdan, Jennifer Pan, and Yiqing Xu. 2021. “Public sentiment on Chinese social media during the emergence of COVID-19.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1. (PDF, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer. 2021. “Experiments on political activity governments want to keep hidden.” In Advances in Experimental Political Science, edited by James N. Druckman and Donald P. Green. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Amazon, Google Books Preview)

Lu, Yingdan, and Jennifer Pan. 2020. “Capturing clicks: how the Chinese government uses clickbait to compete for visibility.” Political Communication 38(1-2): 23-54. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, and Alexandra A. Siegel. 2020. “How Saudi crackdowns fail to silence online dissent.” American Political Science Review 114: 109-125. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2020. “Censorship’s effect on incidental exposure to information: evidence from Wikipedia.” SAGE Open 10(1): 1-14. (PDF)

Hilbert, Martin, George Barnett, Joshua Blumenstock, Noshir Contractor, Jana Diesner, Seth Frey, Sandra González-Bailón, PJ Lamberson, Jennifer Pan, Tai-Quan Peng, Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, Paul E. Smaldino, Wouter van Atteveldt, Annie Waldherr, Jingwen Zhang, and Jonathan J. H. Zhu. 2019. “Computational communication science: a methodological catalyzer for a maturing discipline.” International Journal of Communication 13: 23. (PDF)

Zhang, Han, and Jennifer Pan. 2019. “CASM: a deep-learning approach for identifying collective action events with text and image data from social media.” Sociological Methodology 49(1): 1-57. (PDF, Appendix, CASM Dataset)

Reeves, Byron, Nilam Ram, Thomas N. Robinson, James J. Cummings, C. Lee Giles, Jennifer Pan, Agnese Chiatti, et al. 2019. “Screenomics: a framework to capture and analyze personal life experiences and the ways that technology shapes them.” Human-Computer Interaction 36(2): 150-201. (PDF)

Pan, Jennifer. 2019. “How Chinese officials use the internet to construct their public image.” Political Science Research and Methods 7(2): 197-213. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Muise, Daniel, and Jennifer Pan. 2019. “Online field experiments.” Asian Journal of Communication 29(3): 217-234. (PDF)

Pan, Jennifer, and Kaiping Chen. 2018. “Concealing corruption: how Chinese officials distort upward reporting of online grievances.” American Political Science Review 112(3): 602-620. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Field, Anjalie, Doron Kliger, Shuly Wintner, Jennifer Pan, Dan Jurafsky, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2018. “Framing and agenda-setting in Russian news: a computational analysis of intricate political strategies.” EMNLP 2018. (PDF)

Pan, Jennifer, and Yiqing Xu. 2018. “China’s ideological spectrum.” Journal of Politics 80(1): 254-273. (PDF, Appendix, Replication)

Jaros, Kyle, and Jennifer Pan. 2018. “China’s newsmakers: how media power is shifting in the Xi Jinping era.” China Quarterly 233: 111-136. (PDF, Appendix)

King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2017. “How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument.” American Political Science Review 111(3): 484-501. (PDF, Replication)

Pan, Jennifer. 2017. “How market dynamics of domestic and foreign social media firms shape strategies of internet censorship.” Problems of Post-Communism 64(3-4): 167-188. (PDF, Replication)

Meng, Tianguang, Jennifer Pan, and Ping Yang. 2017. “Conditional receptivity to citizen participation: evidence from a survey experiment in China.” Comparative Political Studies 50(4): 399-433. (PDF, Replication)

Chen, Jidong, Jennifer Pan, and Yiqing Xu. 2016. “Sources of authoritarian responsiveness: a field experiment in China.” American Journal of Political Science 60(2): 383-400. (PDF, Replication)

Monroe, Burt L., Jennifer Pan, Margaret E. Roberts, Maya Sen, and Betsy Sinclair. 2015. “No! Formal theory, causal inference, and big data are not contradictory trends in political science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 48(1): 71-74. (PDF)

King, Gary, Jennifere Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2014. “Reverse-engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation.” Science 345, no. 6199: 1-10. (PDF, Supplement, Summary, Replication)

King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. “How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression.” American Political Science Review 107(2): 1-18. (PDF, Replication)

Zhang, Fujie, Hsu, Michael, Yu, Lan, Wen, Yi, Tuo, Jia, Zhang, Ruijuan, and Jennifer Pan. 2006. “Initiation of the National Free ART Program in Rural China,” in Joan Kaufman, Arthur Kleinman, and Tony Saich, eds. Social Policies and HIV/AIDS in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 96-124. (PDF)

Zhang, Fujie, Jennifer Pan, Lan Yu, Yi Wen, Ye Ma, and Yan Zhao. 2005. “Current Progress of China’s Free ART Program.” Cell Research. 15(11-12): 877-882. (Link)

Zhang, Fujie, Yi Wen, Lan Yu, Ye Ma, Jennifer Pan, and Yan Zhao. 2005. “Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV/AIDS and Current Situation of China Free ARV Program.” Science and Technology Review 7(23): 24-29. (Link)