Table 5 - uploaded by Darrel Robinson
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
The 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 tha...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... di↵erence-in-means calculations are presented in Table 5 -Column 1 identifies the statement of interest, Column 2 is the proportion in agreement with the direct questioning method, Column 3 reports the proportion in agreement with the indirect questioning method, and Column 4 is the di↵erence in the two proportions. A quick glance at the fourth column makes it readily apparent that falsification is present in all four of our survey items; direct questioning is a biased method of estimating regime support in China. ...
Similar publications
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...
Citations
... By examining the correlation between hierarchical trust and satisfaction with democracy, he unveiled that the surrogate measure of latent trust depicted a substantially diminished political trust. Additionally, Robinson and Tannenberg (2018) identified significant self-censorship in surveys conducted in China through list experiments. ...
The remarkably high level of political trust observed in Chinese surveys has ignited enduring debates regarding whether fear has inflated these numbers. The opposing sides share one assumption: fear and trust are inherently contradictory. Our study proposes an alternative view. Grounded in cognitive dissonance theory, which holds that induced compliance can lead to sincere attitude change, we argue that fear has in fact increased political trust in China. We take Xi's sweeping anti-corruption campaign as a quasi-natural experiment to test this theory. Using 2002-2021 survey data and employing a Difference-in-Differences model, we take the campaign as treatment and regime insiders as the treated group, finding that political trust among regime insiders increased faster than among outsiders during the campaign. This finding withstands various robustness checks. Our study not only addresses the fear-love conundrum in China studies but also uncovers a general mechanism of legitimacy production in deeply authoritarian states.
... This can be interpreted in two ways: first, that cycling behavioural trends between the countries composing the Asian sample (China and Malaysia) were substantially heterogeneous, or presenting several specificities, as suggested by previous behavioural studies in the region, such as Li (Li et al., 2021) and Zheng et al. (2019). Secondly, it is possible (although not verifiable) that common method biases could influence data collection, often observable in contexts where participants may perceive that fair data handling cannot be guaranteed or remain beyond all potential efforts and rigour of researchers (Robinson & Tannenberg, 2018;Ruiz-Hernandez et al., 2020;Li, Shi & Zhu, 2018). Regardless, this lack of fit in the case of the Asian sample remains very slight. ...
Given different advances in applied literature, risky and positive behaviours keep gaining ground as key contributors for riding safety outcomes. In this regard, the Cycling Behaviour Questionnaire (CBQ) represents one of the tools available to assess the core dimensions of cycling behaviour and their relationship with road safety outcomes from a behavioural perspective. Nevertheless, it has never been psychometrically approached through a cross-cultural perspective. Therefore, this study aimed to perform the cross-cultural validation of the CBQ, examining
... However, even if PAPI is biased in favor of the ruling party, we do not expect this to vary systematically across districts, preventing 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 & Tannenberg, 2018). This would imply that participation of non-party and independent candidates in elections might be under-reported in our study, making it harder to find an effect. ...
An extensive literature shows that democracies tend to do a better job of protecting the environment than autocracies. Much less work has been done to explain the considerable variation in environmental quality within many authoritarian settings. We help fill this gap with an empirical study of Vietnam – one of the world’s most stable authoritarian regimes as well as one of the most environmentally vulnerable. We focus on the relationship between interest group activity and environmental outcomes (air and water quality) at the district level. While the participation of more actors in civic and political life has the potential to improve outcomes by enhancing scrutiny of government, interest groups may also promote economic interests to the detriment of environmental protection. Our analysis shows that districts characterized by higher levels of local interest group activity tend to have lower air and water quality. This result is consistent across a range of model specifications and estimation strategies. These findings imply that organization of local interests may be detrimental to environmental quality in authoritarian settings and that effective mobilization of actors who would benefit from high environmental quality (i.e., citizens) may be overshadowed by those of pro-business interests. As such, our findings highlight the limits of popular participation related to environmental protection in authoritarian regimes – particularly those that base their legitimacy on economic development.
... 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. ...
... 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. ...
The need to collect data on governance-related issues has been growing since the 1990s. Demand gained momentum in 2015 with the adoption of SDG16 worldwide and Agenda 2063 in Africa. African countries played a key role in the adoption of SDG16 and are now leading the process of collecting harmonised household data on Governance, Peace and Security (GPS). Yet the possibility has recently been raised that sensitive survey data collected by government institutions are potentially biased due to self-censorship by respondents. This paper studies the potential bias in responses to what are seen as sensitive questions, here governance issues, in surveys conducted by public organisations. We compare Afrobarometer (AB) survey data, collected in eight African countries by self-professed independent institutions, with first-hand harmonised GPS survey data collected by National Statistics Offices (NSOs). We identify over 20 similarly worded questions on democracy, trust in institutions and perceived corruption. We first compare responses from AB survey respondents based on who they believe the survey sponsor to be. No systematic response bias is found between respondents who believe the government to be behind the AB survey and those who consider it to be conducted by an independent institution. Our estimations suggest that the observed residual differences are due to a selection bias on the observables, which is mitigated by propensity score matching procedures. The absence of a systematic self-censorship or attenuation bias is further evidenced by means of an experimental design, whereby responses from GPS surveys conducted by NSOs (the treatment) are compared with AB surveys sponsored by reportedly independent bodies. Our results provide evidence, at much higher levels of precision than other existing data sources, of the capacity and legitimacy of government-related organisations to collect data on governance as a matter of national interest and sovereignty.
... Similar levels of support are found in older waves of the WVS, and the Asian Barometer and CGSS. While recent studies have begun to question the reliability of these responses (see eg Jiang and Yang, 2016), studies using indirect questioning techniques nevertheless find that over 60% of respondents support the national government (Robinson and Tannenberg, 2018). are less relevant than the individual benefits one receives, pocketbook factors, of a policy. ...
... One may question the willingness of survey respondents in China to report truthful opinions for fear of criticizing an authoritarian regime. Jiang and Yang (2016) find evidence of self-censorship in survey data in Shanghai, and Robinson and Tannenberg (2018) find that roughly 20% of Chinese respondents overstate their support for the regime on various common measures of support (including both of those used in this paper) in a web-based sample. Further, the authors of both papers argue that this bias is increasing with education. ...
Authoritarian regimes throughout the world expand their education systems in an effort to appease citizens and promote economic growth. Scholars of China argue that this strategy allows the regime to enjoy a high level of public support. Yet, a vast modernization literature argues for the democratizing potential of education. These two diverging theoretical predictions raise an interesting empirical question, what effect does education have on individual-level support for authoritarian rule? I leverage an expansion in higher education in China as an identification strategy to study the effect of education reform on two measures of support for authoritarian rule: support for government censorship and trust in the central government. While the reform opened millions of positions in higher education, it has also resulted in high graduate unemployment and a general decrease in perceived quality. I find that higher education reform led to a substantial decrease in regime support. The negative effect of the reform was strongest among cohorts that entered the weakest labour markets in the year of their graduation and therefore were most likely to be unemployed. I further find that education reform had an effect on values associated with procedural democracy in that it is associated with an increased belief in citizen participation, but that there was no effect on values associated with broader definitions of democracy such as social trust and tolerance.
Se ofrecen algunas consideraciones sobre la revocatoria de mandato en Cuba. Serán abordados sus fundamentos teóricos, los criterios expuestos por la doctrina jurídica y la Teoría Política, y su reconocimiento en la discursiva de los principales dirigentes políticos después de 1959 y en los pronunciamientos del Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC). Se analiza cómo fue tratada esta temática en los debates constitucionales previos a la adopción de la carta magna de 1976, y su implementación jurídica luego de la reforma constitucional de 1992, hasta la actualidad. Se pretende resaltar la escasa utilización de la revocatoria en la práctica política cubana.
This article analyses from a cultural perspective why, despite exacerbating income inequality, Chinese people are not in favour of income equality. I argue that the patriotic education campaign initiated in the 1990s encouraged citizens to sacrifice for the greater good of China and caused the Chinese to accept and adapt to a decrease in governmental welfare as well as lessening the demand for it, thus reducing the government’s financial burden of welfare provision. I then test the hypothesis against the Asian Barometer Survey data. The statistical results support my assertion, suggesting that strong patriotic beliefs reduce the preference for social equality, and that private income and economic perspectives do not significantly stimulate the public demand for redistributive policies in China.
La reflexión que se realiza en este capítulo está basada en los resultados del módulo socioeconómico de la encuesta realizada por CubaData. Su objetivo fue indagar en las percepciones sobre la vida cotidiana de los/as cubanos/as, las subjetividades en torno a la situación actual y las perspectivas futuras de la isla en un contexto de incertidumbre política y económica, frente al traspaso de mando y los primeros meses del gobierno de Díaz-Canel. Los resultados muestran una insatisfacción general respecto de la vida cotidiana en la Cuba actual y una visión del futuro bastante conservadora o pesimista.
