Categorical Confusion: Ideological Labels in China

Abstract

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 uncertain. This paper uses two 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, their placements are distorted by a variety of perceptual bias known as differential item functioning. The labels of left and right do not carry a consistent programmatic meaning, and the partisan and symbolic content of these ideological labels is limited. One implication of the absence of a shared ideological understanding is that it prevents Chinese citizens from developing the type of vocabulary necessary for exercising political agency.

Opposite effects of RWA and SDO on war support: Chinese public opinion toward Russia's war in Ukraine

“…Thus, the two coexistent mechanisms complicate the relationship between RWA and SDO in China, potentially working in opposite directions. This can also explain why social attitudes are less ‘constrained’ to a one‐dimensional ideological spectrum in China compared to North America and Europe (Pan & Xu, 2018; Wu, 2023). Nevertheless, whether there can be two opposite mechanisms is a question that needs to be validated in future studies.…”

“…However, the decision was made deliberately. Specifically in the context of China, the conventional self‐identified measurement of ideology has been criticized for the lack of a collectively shared understanding of the left‐right labels (Ma & Lewis, 2020; Wu, 2023). By trial and error, we included an item of self‐identified ideology in our survey, whose results are shown in the Appendix S1.…”

“…(2022) found that regime supporters, known as the conservative left , have a psychological profile of high authoritarianism and a low social dominance orientation. It is also found that, anecdotally, many self‐identified conservative intellectuals opposed market reform and cherished the egalitarian elements of Mao's era (Wu, 2023).…”

“…The issue is particularly salient in China, short of competition between liberal and conservative parties and their corresponding discourses. For example, Wu (2023) found that the self‐labelled item in China carried inconsistent meanings in predicting attitudes.…”