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Re-evaluating Political Trust: The Impact of Survey Nonresponse in Rural China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2020

Kerry Ratigan Open the ORCID record for Kerry Ratigan [Opens in a new window]  and
Leah Rabin
Kerry Ratigan*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
Leah Rabin
Affiliation:
Independent scholar. E-mail: [email protected].
*
E-mail: [email protected] (corresponding author).
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Abstract

Has survey nonresponse caused scholars to overestimate political trust in China? We analyse item nonresponse for sensitive questions on trust in government from our original survey of villagers conducted in China in 2012. We also analyse nonresponse in four other comparable surveys conducted in China between 1993 and 2014. We examine the association between nonresponse to politically sensitive questions and individual characteristics such as sex, level of education, Party membership and cosmopolitanism. We find that less privileged groups may be underrepresented in survey data generally. We find mixed results regarding the association between cosmopolitanism and nonresponse. We conclude that our understanding of political trust in China has been compromised by high rates of item nonresponse, leading to artificially high estimates of trust in the centre and exaggerated accounts of the gap between trust in central and local leaders.

摘要

摘要

问卷调查中的“没有回答”是否导致学者高估了中国的政治信任？ 为此我们对 2012 年的一次问卷调查中针对政府信任的敏感问题的没有回答做了分析。我们同时还对 1993 年至 2014 年间在中国进行的四次调查问卷中相似问题的没有回答做了分析。我们研究了对政治敏感问题没有回答与个体特征，如性别、教育水平、共产党员身份和世界主义，的关系。我们发现具有较少特权的群体在调查数据中的代表性可能不足。我们发现有关世界主义与没有回答之间的关系并不确定。我们得出的结论是，学者对中国政治信任的理解受到高比率没有回答的影响，导致对中央政府信任的人为高估，以及对中央领导人信任和地方领导人信任之间差距的夸大描述。

Keywords

survey methodsmissing datarural ChinaChinese politicspolitical trust问卷调查方法缺失数据中国农村中国政治政治信任
Type
Research Report
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 243 , September 2020 , pp. 823 - 838
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Copyright
Copyright © SOAS University of London 2020

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