연구

2025

1. Under Review

   Power, Vengeance, and Hope: A Roles-Based Analysis of Asymmetric Hashtag Activism for the 2023 War in Gaza

   Tay Jeong

   2025

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   [Working paper, critical feedback from anyone is very much welcome] Using cross-lingual international X trends data and a unique roles-based analytical framework well suited to the study of political affect and granular textual data, this study examines the spatial distribution of emotions in global pro-Palestine and pro-Israel affective spectatorship about the 2023 Gaza War in its early phase. Global pro-Palestine hashtag activism was overwhelmingly focused on victimhood, but Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East uniquely exhibited a comparably strong commitment to glorified sentiments of heroism in tandem with victimhood. In comparison, global pro-Israel hashtag activism was predominately driven by villain-centric messages focusing on the topic of denunciation. Palestine/Gaza and Hamas furnished the main characters to which these three roles were competitively assigned, ultimately serving as condensed signifiers for the perennial media frame contestation between ‘injustice and defiance’ and ‘terrorism’. Contrary to popular attempts to characterize the discursive conflict about the War as a parallel clash of victimhood or vengeful emotions, our results reveal the starkly asymmetrical nature of affective spectatorship by political partisanship. We propose a power-centric interpretation of the observed affective asymmetries, which we argue is more plausible than culturalist explanations. We also reflect on the observed affective fissure within the global Palestine solidarity movement amidst debates about the cultural praxis of subalternity that have intensified since the outbreak of the 2023 Gaza War.

2025

1. SMR

   When to Use Counterfactuals in Causal Historiography: Methods for Semantics and Inference

   Tay Jeong

   OnlineFirst at Sociological Methods and Research, 2025

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   According to the interventionist framework of actual causality, causal claims in history are ultimately claims about special types of functional dependencies between two variables, both of which consist not only of an actual event but also a corresponding counterfactual state of affairs. Rather than advocate the methodological use of counterfactuals tout court, we propose specific circumstances in historical writing where counterfactual reasoning comes in most handy. At the level of semantics, that is, the specification of the variables and their possible values, an explicit specification of the latent contrast classes becomes particularly useful in situations where one may be prompted to take an event that is pre-empted by the antecedent of interest as its proper causal contrast. At the level of inference, we argue that cases in which two or more antecedents appear to be playing a similar role tend to fumble our pre-theoretical intuition about cause and propose a sequence of counterfactual tests based on actual examples from causal historiography.

2. NATIONS NATL

   Fighting over nation or state: States, communal demography, and the type of ethnic civil war

   Matthew Lange, and Tay Jeong

   Nations and Nationalism, 2025

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   We recognise nationalist and centre-seeking ethnic civil wars as distinct types of conflict and draw on key ideas from political sociology to make hypotheses about the causes of each. First, we argue that the character of states shapes antistate actors in ways that channel ethnic conflict in different ways, with pluralist states promoting nationalist warfare but integrative states contributing to centre-seeking civil war. Second, we propose that the relative power of communities affects the type of ethnic civil war, arguing that centre-seeking civil war is most common in situations of communal multipolarity whereas nationalist civil war is concentrated in regions with asymmetric power relations. And because historical statehood promotes elements of pluralist states and asymmetric communal power relations, we hypothesise that the risk of nationalist civil war is high in places with large and longstanding states. To test these hypotheses, we use ethnic fractionalisation to measure configurations of communal power and the state antiquity index to measure level of historical statehood, create a variable measuring the extent to which colonial states were pluralist, and run panel analyses of the odds of civil war onset. With one possible exception, the findings support our hypotheses.

2024

1. HYPATIA

   Epistemic diversity and epistemic advantage: A comparison of two causal theories in feminist epistemology

   Tay Jeong

   Hypatia A JOURNAL OF FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY, 2024

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   Feminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.

2. NATIONS NATL

   Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation

   Tay Jeong, and Choong Kyo Jeong

   Nations and Nationalism, 2024

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   Does ethnic empowerment under colonial rule shape ethnic power even after independence? Existing research offers mixed arguments and rarely differentiates between different types of political empowerment. Drawing on the historical observation that the parliament and the security forces were two of the major sources of political power in newly independent states, this preregistered study tests whether ethnic representation in the colonial constabulary force and the receipt of guaranteed communal representation in the colonial legislature reduces the risk of postcolonial ethnic exclusion in ex-British colonies. It is found that the former has a strong and consistent effect on reducing the odds of postcolonial ethnic exclusion, but the latter, despite its frequent usage as a form of colonial ethnic empowerment, does not prevent political exclusion. The importance of martial vis-à-vis rational-legal power in newly independent states and varying levels of diachronic continuity between the two forms of colonial empowerment may account for the diverging results.

2023

1. CHILD ABUSE N

   Family economic status and vulnerability to suicidal ideation among adolescents: A re-examination of recent findings

   Tay Jeong

   Child Abuse & Neglect, 2023

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   According to the “differential vulnerability hypothesis,” individuals in adverse socioeconomic circumstances as less mentally resilient to stressful events. However, several recent papers radically challenged this hypothesis based on the accumulated literature on stress inoculation and presented cases in which lower-SES adolescents appear to be less vulnerable to suicidal ideation in the face of interpersonal aggression. We re-examine the link between psychological vulnerability to acute stressors and SES using yearly longitudinal public survey data from South Korea.We reaffirm the well-established finding that bullying victimhood strongly and consistently increases the odds of suicidal ideation (OR = 1.859, p < 0.01). However, we find no evidence in favor of the traditional “differential vulnerability hypothesis” or the recently proposed counterhypothesis.

2. Korea J.

   A History of Resistance [Extended book review]

   Tay Jeong

   Korea Journal, 2023

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3. NATIONS NATL

   Community-based legislative representation and postcolonial ethnic civil warfare in former British and French colonies

   Tay Jeong

   Nations and Nationalism, 2023

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   Previous research reported that “discriminatory” communalizing colonial policies increase the risk of postcolonial ethnic civil war. An analysis of newly collected group-level data on communal legislative representation shows that having been in a colony that had this institution greatly increased the risk of ethnic warfare, but whether an ethnic group was or was not a beneficiary of this policy within such a colony provides no information. I also test how colonial communal representation combines with postcolonial exclusion to predict ethnic warfare. I interpret the results with insights from strain theory.

2022

1. SOCIETY

   Cutting off the branch on which we are sitting? On postpositivism, value neutrality, and the “bias paradox”

   Axel Berg, and Tay Jeong

   Society, 2022

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   We offer a comprehensive review of “postpositivist” theories that reject the pursuit of value neutrality in the social and natural sciences. We argue that none is successful, and all such theories covertly return to the “positivism” that they claim to reject. We attribute this intellectual failure to a widespread blindness to the fact that the “positivist” ideal of value neutrality embodies the very principles of egalitarianism and democracy that postpositivist critical theories commonly subscribe to.

2. NATIONS NATL

   A tale of two empires: Models of political community in British and French colonies

   Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Charlotte Gaudreau

   Nations and Nationalism, 2022

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   Using a newly constructed index of colonial pluralism, we test the hypothesis that British colonial rule was more pluralist than French colonial rule. We then trace the different historical origins of the British and French models of political community. The British model was shaped by Britain’s experience with anticolonial movements in India, whereas the French model was influenced my political concerns in metropolitan France.

3. SOC SCI MED

   Contextual fallacy in MLMs with cross-level interaction: A critical review of neighborhood effects on psychiatric resilience

   Tay Jeong

   Social Science & Medicine, 2022

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   1. In multilevel modeling, not partialing out the effect of the L1 variable induces contextual fallacy; 2. The concept of “contextual effect” can be extended to an interaction setting; 3. Merely including a cross-level interaction is highly prone to contextual fallacy; 4. Adding an appropriate L1-L1 interaction may improve the fit between theory and analysis; 5. I demonstrate through simulation and replication that past studies of neighborhood effects on psychiatric resilience offer little insight.

2021

1. PLoS One

   Do more stress and lower family economic status increase vulnerability to suicidal ideation? Evidence of a U-shaped relationship in a large cross-sectional sample of South Korean adolescents

   Tay Jeong

   Plos one, 2021

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   Existing research in health sociology conventionally assumes that living in a stressful or socially underprivileged environment reduces resilience to mental health problems. However, the burgeoning psychological literature on stress inoculation shows that too little exposure to adversity may also compromise resilience. An analysis of a large cross-sectional sample of Korean adolescents reveals that, consistent with the “inverted-U” theory, resilience to suicidal ideation is highest for those who report medium levels of chronic stress and who self-identify as having a medium level of family economic status.

2. EUR J SOCIOL

   Communalizing colonial policies and postcolonial ethnic warfare: A multimethod analysis of the British empire

   Matthew Lange, Emre Amasyali, and Tay Jeong

   European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 2021

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   Communalizing colonial policies (CCPs) refer to colonial policies that governed the indigenous population based on communal membership. We hypothesize that discriminatory forms of CCPs strongly increased the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare. A cross-country statistical analysis of countries in the former British empire supports our hypothesis: Discriminatory CCPs such as communal legislative representation and ethnic police recruitment had strong effects on postcolonial warfare while non-discriminatory CCPs such as census enumeration and indirect rule did not. We confirm our statistical findings through a historical case study of the Karens in Myanmar, paying attention to the historical significance of each type of CCP that we examine in the statistical analysis.

3. INT J COMP SOC

   The colonial origins of ethnic warfare: Re-examining the impact of communalizing colonial policies in the British and French Empires

   Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Emre Amasyali

   International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 2021

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   We test the findings of the previous paper (listed right below) using a country sample that contains both former British and French colonies. We reaffirm the finding that discriminatory CCPs increase the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare. We find no evidence that other types of CCPS, such as those that merely differentiate communities, increase the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare.

2019

1. 경제와 사회

   미국은 북한 체제 보장을 약속했는가? 비핵화 협상 국면에서 한국 언론의 인용보도 왜곡 실태 분석 (Did the US guarantee the ‘regime’ of North Korea? A study of systematic citation errors in South Korean news media)

   Tay Jeong, and Choong-Kyo Jeong

   경제와 사회 (Economy and Society), 2019

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   We show that in the 2018-2019 US-DPRK negotiations, the term denoting the compensation to be paid by the US to the DPRK develops through three relatively distinct stages. After June 2018, which corresponds to the third period, all negotiating parties standardly used the term ‘security guarantee,’ with ‘the DPRK’ as its intended recipient. But how did South Korean media report on this term? Based on the observation that most reports arbitrarily quoted the term as “regime security guarantee,” we analyzed news articles from 24 major South Korean newspapers and news broadcasts. We also compare the citation accuracy of South Korean media to those of English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian-language media and show that South Korean media are by far the least accurate.

2. J ASIAN HIST

   A Conceptual Appendix to “The Politics of Historical Knowledge”

   Tay Jeong

   Journal of Asian History, 2019

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   I respond to published criticisms of my 2018 article “The politics of historical knowledge,” which tended to engage in speculations of a covert normative message that purportedly underlie the predominantly descriptive arguments. I argue that the history of historiography of Korean antiquity strongly suggests that at least some works in the heterodox tradition have a legitimate spot in the rational reconstruction of scientific historiography. The subrational origins of modern scholarship call for more intellectual humility rather than a stricter policing of deviant theories.

2018

1. 역사비평

   ‘사이비사학’ 비판을 비판한다 (A critique of criticizing “pseudohistory”)

   Tay Jeong

   역사비평 (Critical Review of History), 2018

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   This article expresses concern with the unprecedented attack on “pseudohistory” that this journal (Critical Review of History) presented in cooperation with dozens of professional historians in three consecutive issues. While acknowledging the harms done by some aggressive extra-institutional historians to professional research, I argue that using the term “pseudohistory” to refer to objects rather than ascribe a property to already demarcated objects has undesirable epistemic, prudential, and ethical consequences for the study of Korean antiquity.

2. J ASIAN HIST

   The Politics of Historical Knowledge: The Debate on the Historical Geography of Old Chosŏn and Lelang Commandery

   Tay Jeong

   Journal of Asian History, 2018

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   Since colonial times, modern scholarship of Korean antiquity always had a “heterodox” tradition that depicted a much more expansive scope of ancient Korean states and cultures than their “orthodox” counterparts. I present a detailed and up-to-date history of historiography of Old Chosŏn and Lelang Commandery that tracks the diachronic development of both traditions and how their boundaries shifted over time and interacted with each other. Close attention is paid to the influence of external factors as much as internal.

2017

1. REV KOR STUD

   Korean Living Standards under Japanese Colonial Rule: A Critical Review of the Longitudinal Trajectory of Stature

   Tay Jeong

   Review of Korean Studies, 2017

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   Recently, some South Korean economic historians argued that historical height data reveals robust improvements in biological living standards of the Korean masses throughout the colonial period. However, upon careful examination, the available height data is most consistent with the previously influential thesis of an inverse U-shaped trajectory with its peak in the late 1920s / early 1930s. The historical trajectory of other notable indicators of biological living standards such as consumption, wage, and inequality also supports this conclusion.

2024

1. Book chapters

   Chapter 2: The British Pluralist Model in Comparative Perspective, in "Pluralism’s Legacies: British Colonialism, Precolonial Statehood, and Nationalist Civil Warfare" [provisional book title], Under publishing agreement with Princeton University Press

   Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Charlotte Gaudreau

   2024
2. Chapter 3: A Statistical Analysis of Colonial Pluralism, Precolonial Statehood, and Nationalist Civil War, in "Pluralism’s Legacies: British Colonialism, Precolonial Statehood, and Nationalist Civil Warfare" [provisional book title], Under publishing agreement with Princeton University Press

   Matthew Lange, Tay Jeong, and Charlotte Gaudreau

   2024