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The study of popular support for authoritarian regimes has long relied on the assumption that respondents provide truthful answers to 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 au...
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... Yet, valid doubts exist about the reliability of numbers provided by the Iranian government for several reasons. First, Iran's regime is an authoritarian body of governance (Chehabi, 1991), and research has shown that polls conducted in such states are biased due to considerable self-censorship and social desirability rates (e.g., Kalinin, 2016;Robinson & Tannenberg, 2019). Second, leaving the state religion or deconversion in Iran could be met with serious punishments, such as imprisonment or the death penalty. ...
We investigated factors contributing to rising religious deidentification in Iran, a Muslim-majority country where disparities exist in the religious demographics provided by the governmental census and independent surveys. Using cultural evolution theory, we examined the impact of credibility enhancing and undermining displays (CREDs and CRUDs) at three levels: parents, community members, and religious leaders. Across two correlational and one experimental study (two preregistered), we measured associations between CREDs, CRUDs, and religious (de)identification. Study 3 experimentally manipulated religious leaders’ CRUDs. Studies 1 and 2 showed that parental CREDs and religious leaders’ CRUDs were positively and negatively associated with religious belief among religious individuals, respectively. Study 3 found that religious leaders’ CRUDs increase negative attitudes toward religion and decrease identification with the institution of religion, but did not immediately affect individualistic spirituality. Findings highlight the role of clergy in religious deidentification, with implications for the role of cultural evolution theory in Muslim-majority contexts.
... Survey researchers working in authoritarian settings need to face the problem of preference falsification in survey responses. As people fear that critical answers may lead to punishment or be reported to the authorities, they are more likely to offer politically correct and pro-government responses (Cantoni, Chen, Yang, Yuchtman, & Zhang, 2017;Robinson & Tannenberg, 2019;Stockmann, Esarey, & Zhang, 2018). ...
People living in authoritarian or autocratizing societies may have to refrain from expressing their genuine political views to avoid troubles. Besides preference falsification, some may simply refrain from engaging in political expressions and discussions. This study aims at understanding avoidance of political discussions in an autocratizing society. It posits perceptions of legal and social risks, political frustration, political orientation, and secondary control as possible predictors of avoidance of political discussions. A survey of citizens in post-National Security Law Hong Kong shows that pro-democracy citizens in Hong Kong are more likely to perceive the presence of social and legal risks. They are also more likely to feel frustrated by the political environment. Perceived social risks significantly predict avoidance of political discussions, and the relationship is stronger among people with higher levels of secondary control. Implications of the findings are discussed.
... The public sphere in China, as is often the case in autocratic regimes (e.g. Tannenberg 2022; see also Robinson and Tannenberg 2019), is controlled by the state authorities, there are severe limitations to free speech and the internal decision-making process, including foreign policy, is not transparent to either domestic society or foreign observers. By and large, it must be assumed that a societal perspective on Chinese perceptions inevitably reffiects the views of the regime, whether because of the ogcial government line, which is the only legitimate source of information for the population, or because of the selfcensorship that respondents to surveys and interviews impose on themselves. ...
... 5 See Appendix 3 for more information on the survey and items used in our analyses.6 Several studies (e.g.,Lei & Lu, 2017;Robinson & Tannenberg, 2019;Shi, 2001;Tang, 2016) investigate whether overreporting political trust constitutes a problem in Chinese surveys. Findings are mixed. ...
In a substantial literature on political trust in normal times, we know little about the impact on trust of crises or subsequent government efforts at correction. We investigate these impacts by analyzing a pair of similar governance failures in China, a strong single-party authoritarian state with high levels of political trust and sophisticated tools to manage negative information about its performance. We theorize that how citizens update beliefs about government trustworthiness depends on prior experience: firsthand knowledge and anecdotal evidence supply powerful “insider” information that citizens bring to their processing of news. We leverage occurrence of two exogenous shocks—a vaccine crisis and a subsequent government correction—with administration of a face-to-face, nationally representative survey in 2018. We find: (1) the 2018 crisis reduced trust, regardless of prior experience; and (2) the subsequent correction did not increase trust for “insiders,” residing in cities exposed to a similar crisis and correction in 2016, but did increase trust for other citizens. We show that governance failure is not a singular event concluded with crisis weathered and trust rebuilt through corrective efforts. Instead, it introduces a persistent constraint on the persuasiveness of government claims of trustworthiness. Past governance failures persist in social perceptions and are reactivated by similar failures, with attention to one failure elevated in the long term for citizens familiar with it from experience.
... Citizens initially engage in self-censorship as surveillance increases to avoid punishment or repercussions [22,32]. However, as repression becomes more severe, they resist and actively undermine censorship efforts. ...
This study examines the implementation of mass digital surveillance systems in China, analyzing the relationship between technological sophistication and effective social control. The research explores how a government deployed artificial intelligence , facial recognition, and predictive analytics to monitor its population, investing heavily in what appeared to be a comprehensive digital surveillance apparatus. The study identifies a counterintuitive pattern wherein increased digital surveillance capabilities corresponded with decreased effectiveness in maintaining effective surveillance, like diseconomies of scale in markets. The research contributes to ongoing discussions about the efficacy of digital surveillance states and challenges assumptions about the relationship between technological capability and social control. These findings have significant implications for understanding authoritarian governance, privacy rights, and the limitations of artificial intelligence in social monitoring systems.
... It has recently been suggested that nonresponse rates may be used to evaluate the prevalence of preference falsification within authoritarian states (Benstead, 2018;Shamaileh, 2019;Shen and Truex, 2021). Nonresponse rates have frequently been used as tangential elements of analyses related to preference falsification meant to either corroborate the primary findings or test some ancillary aspect of the research (Jiang and Yang, 2016;Robinson and Tannenberg, 2019;Shamaileh, 2019). The intuition underlying the use of nonresponse rates to proxy for preference falsification in tangential analyses is at the heart of the recently developed self-censorship index (SCI), which is meant to act as a proxy for preference falsification that allows for cross-country comparisons (Shen and Truex, 2021). ...
... In their view, "item nonresponse rates can be used to measure self-censorship, which will indirectly allow us to assess the broader idea of preference falsification, and to measure its likely incidence across time and space" (Shen andTruex, 2021: 1675). This view reflects the logic underlying the use of nonresponse rates to proxy for preference falsification in many other studies (Jiang and Yang, 2016;Robinson and Tannenberg, 2019;Shamaileh, 2019). The goal is to capture to some reasonable extent the sensitivity bias associated with preference falsification through a measure of self-censorship since they ostensibly move in the same direction. ...
Among the greatest challenges facing scholars of public opinion are the potential biases associated with survey item nonresponse and preference falsification. This difficulty has led researchers to utilize nonre-sponse rates to gauge the degree of preference falsification across regimes. This article addresses the use of survey nonresponse rates to proxy for preference falsification. A simulation analysis exploring the expression of preferences under varying degrees of repression was conducted to examine the viability of using nonresponse rates to regime assessment questions. The simulation demonstrates that nonresponse rates to regime assessment questions and indices based on nonresponse rates are not viable proxies for preference falsification. An empirical examination of survey data supports the results of the simulation analysis.
... We should not discount the possibility that citizens across countries judge the police on different criteria, noting critiques by the likes of Norris (1999) that citizens living in more democratic nations may be more critical of authorities precisely because this openness is displayed more overtly through media and political discourse. We recognize however, that at the aggregate level, levels of confidence in the police were very similar between the most authoritarian and democratic regimes, though we cannot discount the possibility that in the case of authoritarian regimes, these confidence levels are overinflated because of a lack of public scrutiny regarding the police, as well as possibly the fear of giving honest answers in surveys (see Robinson & Tannenberg, 2019;Tannenberg, 2017). In the case of the latter-fear of giving honest answers or even study participation altogether-we recognize the potential problems in terms of contexts of state repression, uncertainty about whether state agencies will have access to their survey responses, and the perceived lack of independence between researchers and the state in some countries. ...
Studies of public confidence in the police have enabled important insights into the factors responsible for achieving public support. Empirically tested in overwhelmingly democratic nations, there remain questions about the generalizability of this work to different types of political regimes, especially authoritarian nations. Using Wave 7 of the World Values Survey ( n = 38,838) we assess whether predictors of police confidence operate in similar or different ways within the most democratic and authoritarian nations. Both regimes share similar underpinnings of confidence (corruption, religious identity, neighborhood trust, and government performance). Yet, key differences exist (i.e., country‐level differences measuring insecurity and instability, press freedom and corruption).
... We also need to be aware that the perception of the government is a sensitive issue, for which the public may not be willing to provide the most truthful answer, especially in direct question surveys (Blair et al., 2020). In recent papers, the gap in Chinese public support or trust for the government, obtained through direct questions and list experiments, ranged from almost no difference to nearly 30% (Carter et al., 2024;Nicholson & Huang, 2023;Robinson & Tannenberg, 2019;Tang, 2016). Although we believe that the use of free association with government-related words rather than direct questions in our studies can reduce respondents' alertness to the research objectives and their concerns about social desirability, and we have also employed anonymous surveys to minimize these effects as much as possible, such subjective reporting may still be susceptible to response bias. ...
Many studies have noted the close relationship between the government and people’s life satisfaction. However, little literature has paid attention to the role of government stereotypes. This research fills this gap using two large samples of Chinese residents. In the first-phase study, we explored the content and structure of government stereotypes with a data-driven approach. We found that the content of government stereotypes consisted of four clusters: positive evaluations, negative evaluations, things about government duties, and things about the government system. Further, the content of government stereotypes could be distinguished based on two orthogonal dimensions: the valence (negative vs. positive) and the degree of generality (particularized vs. generalized). In the second-phase study, we examined how various dimensions of government stereotypes were related to life satisfaction. We found that people with more positive government stereotypes were more satisfied with life. This association was more potent when government stereotypes were more generalized (i.e., a good government at a higher construal level) than particularized (i.e., a government that does good at a lower construal level). Both studies of this research were repeatable within the two large samples. This research provided a new perspective for the literature on the relationship between government and life satisfaction and the interventions to improve life satisfaction.
... Second, the combination of Thailand's repressive political environment and the sensitive nature of our questions might have resulted in a degree of selfcensorship among our respondents. As Robinson and Tannenberg (2019) show, self-censorship is common in public opinion surveys in authoritarian regimes. ...
Combining international relations and critical geopolitics literature with a public opinion survey in Thailand that delves into some rarely explored and sensitive questions to understand respondents’ political views and attitudes, we examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China. To view election outcomes in a country such as Thailand as “wins” for one or other great power would be highly misleading.
... After receiving the respondents' answers, the interviewers asked the same question twice and recorded the answers in the questionnaire. Admittedly, some may argue that respondents in authoritarian regimes may exhibit self-censorship tendencies and not provide honest answers [14,63,67]. In response to this concern, other scholars have used experimental methods and reached differing conclusions, with the majority of Chinese people not concealing their preferences because of political pressure [43,74]. ...
Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) emphasis on whole process people’s democracy and democracy with Chinese characteristics, the type of democracy desired by the Chinese people remains debatable. Using two nationwide surveys conducted in 2015 and 2019, this study examines how ordinary Chinese people view democracy during Xi Jinping’s new era. Acknowledging the constraints of conventional methodologies, this study adopts a novel approach that uses automated text analysis to dissect open-ended survey responses about democracy. The results reveal that Chinese citizens primarily associate democracy with freedom of speech, consultation, and minben rather than competitive elections. Furthermore, this study reveals that a higher level of education, more frequent internet usage, and higher household income are positively correlated with a liberal perspective on democracy. This suggests that although the Chinese communist regime may not face immediate pressure to implement open elections, growing support for consultation and freedom may necessitate a greater focus on procedural democracy building by the CCP. By supplementing traditional research methods, this study contributes to a better understanding of China’s regime resilience and its potential future trajectories.
