In spatial models of political competition in democracies, citizens vote for the party or candidate that is the closest to their own ideological position, while in valence models, voters decide on the basis of non-policy factors, such as competence. What remains unclear, however, is whether citizens in authoritarian regimes use spatial or valence considerations to guide their decisions to participate in politics. This study uses data from the 2015 Chinese Urban Governance Survey to measure the ideology of Chinese citizens, and estimates an empirical stochastic model to explore how Chinese citizens use ideological distance and valence to determine how they want to participate in politics. The results show that valence issues, such as perceived government competence, play a larger role in political participation than ideology.
Authoritarian regimes respond to threatening student movements with repression and censorship. In many cases, failed movements are effectively erased from public memory. Do such movements affect long-term attitudes? We use a survey of college graduates to measure the impact of a failed student movement. Some of our respondents began college immediately before a major protest; others started after the movement had been suppressed. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity, we find that individuals who attended college during the movement are significantly less likely to trust the government, more than 25years later, than individuals who enrolled after the protests. The effects are strongest for trust in the central government, and weakest for local government. These results are robust to a range of specifications, and show that the experience of mass mobilization and state repression can have a long-term impact on public attitudes, even if the event in question remains taboo.
The idea of a left-right ideological dimension helps citizens and parties organize their thinking about politics. While the left-right dimension is traditionally organized around questions of inequality and change in democracies, its meaning under authoritarian rule remains opaque. This paper uses three national surveys to investigate the policy, partisan, and symbolic content of the left-right dimension in China. The analysis of these surveys reveals that while many Chinese citizens are willing to locate themselves on the left-right scale, the labels of left and right do not carry a consistent programmatic meaning. I also show that the partisan and symbolic content of these ideological labels is limited. I argue that the absence of a shared ideological understanding prevents Chinese citizens from exercising political agency.
This paper investigates whether the Chinese public possesses structured political preferences, or ideology. We show that ideology in China is organized around a state-market economic dimension and an authoritarian-democratic political dimension. The most politically informed individuals are the least likely to constrain their ideological preferences to one dimension, which we argue is a product of the Party’s propaganda efforts. We find that younger and better-educated individuals are the most likely to favor free markets, and that while members of the Communist Party no longer possess any sort of distinct economic preferences, they are markedly more authoritarian. We conclude that the diffuse character of the Chinese public’s preferences provides the Party with an opportunity to divide and rule.
The leaders of authoritarian regimes often invoke nationalist themes to garner support from their populations. However, negative experiences with the regime may effectively inoculate individuals against nationalist campaigns, reducing the ability of the regime to sway public opinion. In this paper, we study the long-term effects of mobilization and repression on nationalist attitudes. We exploit a discontinuity in exposure to a student movement, by comparing alumni who were in college and on campus during the movement with alumni who only enrolled after the movement was suppressed. We find that alumni who were in college during the movement are substantially less nationalistic than those who enrolled shortly thereafter. Our findings are consistent across a range of specifications and show that exposure to mass mobilization and state repression is associated with lower support for nationalism. These differences are observable more than twenty-five years later, despite sustained state censorship.