Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: Response Bias in Measures of Popular Support in China

Abstract

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. The headquarters the V-Dem Institute is based at the University of Gothenburg with 17 sta↵, and a project team across the world with 6 Principal Investigators, 14 Project Managers, 30 Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 3,000 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to: AbstractThe study of popular support for authoritarian regimes, and the comparative study of political attitudes, has long relied on the assumption that survey respondents provide truthful answers on surveys. However, when measuring regime support in closed political systems there is a distinct risk that individuals are less than forthright due to fear that their opinions may be made known to the public or the authorities. In order to test this assumption, we conducted a novel web-based survey in China in which we included four list experiments of commonly used items in the comparative literature on regime support. We find systematic bias for all four measures as a result of selfcensorship; substantially more individuals state that they support the regime with direct questioning than do when presented with our anonymous, indirect list experiments. The level of self-censorship, which ranges from 16 to 22 percentage points, is considerably higher than previously thought. Selfcensorship is further most prevalent among the wealthy, urban, female and younger respondents. These findings indicate that prior studies that have found high levels of support for the Chinese regime using these particular measures likely overestimate the true level of support. Further, crossnational studies which compare popular support across regime type may be systematically biased if responses are not subject to the same level of falsification across regime types.The most elegant way to adjust to censorship is to engage in self-censorship. It is the perfect method for allying with power and setting the stage for mutual exchange of benefit.

Fear of the state in governance surveys? Empirical evidence from African countries

“…While some studies have focused on Zimbabwe and China to identify self-censorship in household surveys in these autocratic countries (García-Ponce & Pasquale, 2015;Robinson and Tannenberg, 2018), only a couple of studies have presented evidence suggesting an attenuation bias in cross-country studies (Tannenberg, 2017;Zimbalist, 2018). The authors of these studies rely on the same data source to put their argument: the AB surveys.…”

“…Seen as highly sensitive issues, it is feared that government-related organisations such as NSOs collect an erroneous picture of the people"s assessment of governance. Recent studies support this sentiment by questioning the reliability of household data on governance issues in autocratic countries (García-Ponce & Pasquale, 2015;Robinson & Tannenberg, 2018; respectively in Zimbabwe and China), despite limited estimated bias (Panel, 2019). Respondents are thought to hide their real feelings and relate more positive perceptions in order to avoid potential reprisals.…”

Evade and Deceive? Citizen Responses to Surveillance

“…In recent years, scholars have designed experimental and quasi-experimental studies to circumvent these challenges. These studies confirm that political preference falsification does occur, but again, most of the evidence is from studies of authoritarian states (García-Ponce and Pasquale 2015; Jiang and Yang 2016;Kalinin 2016;Robinson and Tannenberg 2018). In particular, Tannenberg (2018) finds no evidence of preference falsification in a subset of African developing democracies with regards to questions about citizen-state relations.…”

“…Surveillance is a tool that regimes use to enforce censorship regimes or monitor overt compliance with the state more generally. Most research and theorizing about surveillance and preference falsification has thus focused on authoritarian states (Jiang and Yang 2016;Kalinin 2016;King et al 2013;Kuran 1997;Lorentzen 2014;Roberts 2018;Robinson and Tannenberg 2018), since citizens who express dissenting opinions to the regime are more likely to pay costs in such states than in democratic states where freedom of expression and speech are subject to legal protections.…”

Local interest group activity and environmental degradation in authoritarian regimes

“…However, even if PAPI is biased in favor of the ruling party, we do not expect this to vary systematically across districts, which prevents systematic bias in our analysis and results. Moreover, recent studies find that citizens in authoritarian regimes on average tend to over-report their support for the government in surveys (Robinson and Tannenberg, 2018). This would imply that participation of non-party and self-nominated candidates in elections might be under-reported in our study.…”