Zheng ZHOU

My research examines how identity anxiety and symbolic threats shape the emotional foundations of political trust and institutional legitimacy. I explore how perceived insecurity functions as a psychological mechanism that political systems can either absorb or amplify, thereby influencing the resilience of regimes. At the core of this research lies the revelation of the interactive relationship between emotion and institutions: under what conditions collective anxiety can consolidate trust and legitimacy, and in which scenarios it evolves into social polarization or defensive nationalism. Drawing on theories of ontological security and institutional adaptation, I seek to explain how societies manage anxiety during crises and how emotional insecurity becomes a driving force for political restructuring and governance.

Methodologically, I integrate causal inference, cross-national survey analysis, and experimental design to identify the mechanisms linking identity anxiety, institutional oversight, and threat perception, and to reveal how institutional contexts shape emotional responses and political behavior. This mechanism-oriented comparative approach integrates political psychology with comparative politics, offering a psychologically grounded theoretical framework for understanding democratic resilience under geopolitical and societal pressures.

• Primary fields: Political psychology; comparative politics; democratic resilience; emotion and politics
• Methods: Causal inference; cross-national survey analysis; experimental and multi-level modeling