China's Ideological Spectrum

Abstract:     

Understanding the contours of political cleavage is a core undertaking for comparative research, but there is profound disagreement over the nature of cleavages in regimes with communist legacies. This paper offers a large-scale quantitative analysis of ideology in China to examine the structure of beliefs that underlie political cleavage. Using principal component analysis (PCA) on a survey of 460,563 respondents, we identify an ideological spectrum where preferences on political, economic, and social/cultural values are highly correlated. On one end of the spectrum, preferences for authoritarian rule are aligned with preferences for state intervention in the economy and traditional values, and on the other end, preferences for political liberalization align with preferences for free markets and liberal social values. We find suggestive evidence that individuals with higher income and education and regions with higher levels of economic development, education, trade openness, and urbanization are more likely to have preferences for political liberalization and market allocation. The cleavage we observe does not divide those who support the regime from those who oppose the regime as prevailing theories would predict; instead, it appears to be influenced by the tension between China's communist legacy and the country's market reforms.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 77

Keywords: ideology, authoritarianism, political cleavage, Communism, China, principal component analysis