How the Chinese people understand democracy: a multi-method study based on four waves of nationwide representative surveys

ABSTRACT

Different methods of measurement for survey research have been developed to explore how the public understands democracy. In the existing research on the democratic understanding of the Chinese people, closed-ended questions are often used to measure this understanding. However, the results obtained can only prove whether the democratic understanding of the Chinese people deviates from or is close to liberal democracy. This article applied grounded theory to classify respondents’ answers to an open-ended question. Unlike previous research findings, this article’s findings showed that even Chinese people’s democratic understanding has certain procedural or substantive elements. However, this understanding consists of only emphasizing their rights and interests under the Communist Party of China-led system rather than being more inclined toward liberal democracy. Additionally, the higher effective response rates for closed-ended questions suggested that Chinese people need a higher level of political knowledge and engagement in public affairs to form their own understanding of democracy when answering an open-ended question. We argue that although closed-ended questions are more convenient for statistical analysis, open-ended questions with the classification method developed in this study can paint a more accurate picture of respondents’ understanding of democracy in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Understanding of democracy
• substantive democracy
• procedural democracy
• closed-ended questions
• open-ended questions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The section on hierarchical politics with moral meritocratic leadership for ordinary people can be found in Legge (1861a, p. 176, 359), Legge (1861b, p. 208), and Tu (1993, p. 19). The section on whether the limited political rights of ordinary people should not affect political matters can be found in Legge (1861b, p. 75).

2. For this coding scheme, please refer to Appendix A and to Chu et al. (2008) and Shi (2014).

3. The qualitative information in this article is limited to a three-part open-ended question, which differs from the textual information required for grounded theoretical methods in the general sense. However, in terms of qualitative analysis of the relationship between empirical data, concepts, and theories, this article meets the methodological requirements of grounded theory. In fact, even Anselm Strauss, the proponent of the theory, said that the grounded theory approach ‘is not really a specific method or technique. It is better to say, it is a qualitative analysis style that contains some obvious characteristics.’ Related discussion can be found in Strauss (1987, p. 5).

4. In the four-wave survey, the effective answer rate of the open-ended question for democratic understanding was 71.67% in 2002, 58.01% in 2008, 64.24% in 2011, and 52.95% in 2015.

5. This article labels specific answers from the public to the open-ended question. Participants’ dialogue may be labelled with one or more labels. This article has a total of 539 labels, posted in 59,430 places. We conducted an independent-sample T-test for the differences of the four categories of indicators between 2011 and 2015, and only the difference of the indicators of freedom and liberty was not statistically significant.

6. We conducted paired-sample T-tests for the differences between the number of times the four categories of indicators were selected, and all differences were statistically significant.

7. We conducted an independent-sample T-test for the differences among the four categories of indicators between 2011 and 2015, and only the difference of the indicators of freedom and liberty was not statistically significant.

8. We coded the four-point scale of the original sets into binary: 1 for endorsing the indicators of social equity or good government and −1 for endorsing the indicators of norms and procedures and freedom and liberty. After adding up the four binary variables, a new variable ranging from −4 to 4 was obtained. In this variable, −4 and −3 were merged to indicate ‘strong procedural democratic understanding,’ and −2 and −1 were merged to indicate ‘moderate procedural democratic understanding.’ Additionally, 0 indicated ‘mixed democratic understanding,’ 1 to 2 indicated ‘moderate substantive democratic understanding,’ and 3 to 4 indicated ‘strong substantive democratic understanding.’

9. We conducted the Mann–Whitney test and the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for differences between 2011 and 2015, and both results were significant.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Science General Program, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China [21YJC810009].

Notes on contributors

Hongbo Yu

Hongbo Yu is a Lecturer at School of Public Administration, Nanjing Normal University. His research interests involve China Studies, Political Culture and Political Behavior. His publications have appeared in CASS Journal of Political Science, Youth Studies, Journal of Central China Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences), Fudan Political Science Review, Social Science Front, etc.

Hsin-Che Wu

Hsin-Che Wu (Corresponding author) is Associate Professor, School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University. He received his Ph.D. (2013) from the University of Durham. His research interests are China studies, East Asia politics and Democratization. His publications have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Asian Public Policy, Asian Survey, Journal of Local Self-Government, Comparative Economic & Social Systems, Fudan Political Science Review, and Jiangsu Social Science, etc.