Political Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: The Spatial-Temporal Dimension of Trouble

Chang, Charles; Manion, Melanie

doi:10.1177/0010414021989762

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…It also helps create trust and cooperation from respondents. More importantly, since we ask individuals' attitudes toward the repression of online criticism, respondents answering surveys online may self-censor to avoid state surveillance (Chang and Manion 2021). An anonymous field survey avoids this problem because respondents answer questions on paper questionnaires that do not record any identifiable information.…”

Section: Field Survey Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Control and Public Support for Social Credit Systems in China

Kostka

Cao

2022

The Journal of Politics

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Critics see China's social credit system (SCS) as a tool of surveillance and repression. Yet opinion surveys in China find considerable public support for the SCS. We explain this puzzle by focusing on citizens' lack of knowledge regarding the repressive nature of digital surveillance in dictatorships, which can be attributed to (1) invisible and targeted repression associated with digital surveillance and (2) government propaganda and censorship further concealing its repressive potential. A field survey experiment on 750 college students in three Chinese regions shows that revealing the SCS's repressive potential significantly reduces support for the system, but emphasizing its social-order-maintenance function does not increase support. Observational evidence from the field survey and a nationwide survey of 2,028 Chinese netizens show that the support is higher if citizens knew about the SCS through state media. Our findings highlight the role of information and framing in shaping public opinion on digital surveillance.W hile digital technologies have made people's lives much more convenient, they provide governments with powerful new tools to intervene in society. By 2018, more than 30 countries (15 autocracies) are deploying digital surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens, and this number is rapidly increasing. Among these regimes, China's surveillance state has drawn global attention because of its unprecedented size, sophistication, and international influence-more than 18 countries have adopted China's surveillance technologies as of 2019 (see Polyakova and Meserole 2019). Recently, particular heed is paid to China's social credit system (SCS), a surveillance system that rewards and punishes citizens on the basis of assessments of their "trustworthiness." 1 Although still in its pilot stage, the SCS has collected a large amount of information on citizens' personal, financial, behavioral, and even political conduct to construct their social scores (Wang 2017). Low-score citizens are banned from flights, trains, hotels, good schools, social benefits, government jobs, and so on. Critics raised serious concerns about the SCS's repressive nature, as it has been used to track and punish political activists and human rights lawyers (Gan 2019). 2 Yet, opinion surveys from China find considerable public support for the SCS (Kostka 2019) and for digital surveillance in general (Alsan et al. 2020;Su, Xu, and Cao 2021).Why would citizens in dictatorships support a powerful surveillance tool that could impose substantial political costs on them? The literature on surveillance and state coercion commonly emphasizes the liberty-security trade-off: citizens

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Section: Field Survey Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Control and Public Support for Social Credit Systems in China

Kostka

Cao

2022

The Journal of Politics

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“…In particular, strengthened coercive power may mitigate the informational function of authoritarian legislatures. In general, previous studies demonstrate that the monopoly on legitimate coercion may undermine the provision of information from below (Hooghe et al., 2001; Marks et al., 1996), that dominant political power may breed political reticence (Shen & Truex, 2021), and that politically focal times and locations may encourage individuals to engage in extreme political self‐censorship (Chang & Manion, 2021). Those studies are mainly designed to examine bottom‐up inflow in democracies or to investigate how coercive power fuels self‐censorship among citizens in nondemocracies, but the way coercive power shapes the behaviors of legislators in authoritarian legislatures remains unclear.…”

Section: Power Concentration and Upward Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Power concentration and bottom‐up information flow: Evidence from Chinese municipal congresses

Yang

2023

Governance

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Power concentration may impede bottom‐up information flow. This article argues that strong ruling party control may facilitate the power concentration of ruling elites, which breeds reticence and impedes bottom‐up information flow. Using Chinese municipal congresses as a case, I establish that strong ruling party control significantly reduces the number of policy proposals, suggestions, and criticisms from legislators. The reduction effect of ruling party control on upward information is more salient when party leaders are expected to gain power in the future. Further analysis rules out alternative mechanisms: leadership style, composition of legislators, and local grievance.

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“…Conversely, private discussions about history remain less regulated in Russia (as elsewhere). People generally approve of free expression in the private realm, where trust and intimacy govern the exchange of information (e.g., Chang and Manion 2021).…”

Section: A Past That Binds? Motivation and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

Krawatzek¹,

Soroka²

2023

Perspect. polit.

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Political attempts to control how the past may be represented have flourished in the twenty-first century. Russia participates in this trend, having taken steps to legislatively and juridically safeguard the legacy of the USSR’s involvement in World War II. This has institutionalized an interpretation of the fight against Nazism that was already widely held in society, making the Russian case a “hard test” for evaluating when the violation of a historical norm is deemed appropriate and what the impact of a memory law might be relative to other factors. Drawing on two vignette experiments conducted in 2021, our article demonstrates both that the discursive context in which a controversial statement about the past is made matters when respondents assess whether the person making it should be punished and that criticism of a historical norm is more likely to be accepted when it emanates from an in-group member. We also find that the state has limited ability to influence societal attitudes regarding history. Moreover, a willingness to defend state-led interventions into how the past is depicted aligns with support for the political system but the latter does not necessarily overlap with individuals’ historical views, underscoring the multidimensional nature of collective memory.

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Political Self-Censorship in Authoritarian States: The Spatial-Temporal Dimension of Trouble

Cited by 14 publications

References 61 publications

Information Control and Public Support for Social Credit Systems in China

Information Control and Public Support for Social Credit Systems in China

Power concentration and bottom‐up information flow: Evidence from Chinese municipal congresses

Defending History? The Impact of Context and Speaker in Russia

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