Lying or Believing? Measuring Preference Falsification from a Political Purge in China

Abstract

Despite its wide usage in explaining some nontrivial dynamics in nondemocratic systems, preference falsification remains an empirical myth for students of authoritarian politics. We provide to our knowledge the first quantitative study of preference falsification in an authoritarian setting using a rare coincidence between a major political purge in Shanghai, China, and the administration of a nationwide survey in 2006. We construct two synthetic measures for expressed and actual support from a set of survey questions and track their changes before and after the purge. We find that after the purge there was a dramatic increase in expressed support among Shanghai respondents, yet the increase was paralleled by an equally evident decline in actual support. We interpret this divergence as evidence for the presence of preference falsification. We also find that variations in the degree of preference falsification are jointly predicted by one’s access to alternative source of information and vulnerability to state sanctions. Using two additional surveys conducted over the span of a year, we further show that there was substantial deterioration in political trust in Shanghai six months after the purge, which suggests that falsification could not sustain public support in the long run.

Keywords: preference falsification, public opinion, political trust, China, authoritarian regimes, survey