His work is grounded in the intersection of comparative politics, political theory, and aesthetics. His recent book Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) argues that the post-earthquake reconstruction was intended to be a showcase of the Communist Party’s benevolence, glory, state capacity, economic strength, and urban-rural development models. Sorace analyses how Communist Party discourse and ideology provide the shaken, yet sturdy, bulwarks of political legitimacy in China. At the same time, he examines from a bottom-up perspective, how the reconstruction plans often failed to address the concrete and particular needs of the earthquake survivors.