The impact of political party support on interpersonal political discussion: survey evidence from two Chinese societies

Abstract

This study examines whether and how political party support shapes interpersonal political discussion. Drawing upon existing research, party support is hypothesized to lead to more frequent political discussion and lower levels of disagreement within discussion networks. Party support is also hypothesized to moderate the relationship between news consumption and discussion frequency and the relationship between discussion frequency and disagreement. The analysis further explores if the impact of party support varies according to the parties being supported. The hypotheses and research question were examined using data from representative surveys conducted in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The findings illustrate the importance of political party support in structuring citizens' interpersonal political discussions in the consolidated democracy of Taiwan and, though to a lesser extent, in the semi-democratic environment of Hong Kong. In Taiwan, the impact of discussion frequencies on disagreement in discussion network varies according to the party being supported. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Keywords:

• political party support
• political discussion
• disagreement
• news consumption
• Hong Kong
• Taiwan

Notes on contributors

Francis L. F. Lee (PhD, Stanford University, 2003) is Associate Professor and Head of Graduate Division at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests reside in public opinion studies, journalism studies, political communication, and media and social movements.

Frank C. S. Liu (PhD, University of Kansas, 2006) is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His research interests mainly reside in political communication, political parties, and political identities.

Notes

1. RR1 refers to the minimum response rate and is the strictest formula. Hence, the figure tends to be small. The low response rate is also a result of proliferation of survey research in contemporary societies and is not atypical in contemporary Taiwan.

2. The descriptive statistics of the control variables are not shown due to space concern.

3. There were some respondents in both societies who did not give a valid response to the questions on political disagreement. Some existing studies would recode the “don't know” and other invalid responses into zero (e.g., Lee, 2009; Scheufele, Nisbet, Brossard, & Nisbet, 2004). Those studies adopted the recoding procedure due to their concern with the impact of actual exposure to disagreement on other political attitudinal variables. In those cases, the recoding procedure is reasonable because the invalid answers were given mainly by people who did not discuss politics at all, and people who did not discuss politics were by definition not exposed to disagreement. The present study, however, is not concerned with impact of exposure to disagreement, but to the extent to which the discussion networks are actually homogeneous. Not being exposed to disagreement does not mean that the network is homogeneous. Hence, no recoding was done in this study, and the actual sample sizes for the analysis reported in Table 2 are somewhat smaller.

4. An alternative approach is to treat the 28 respondents who claimed to be partisans and yet did not indicate themselves as a distinctive category “other party supporters.” But we did not create this category, because the category itself is not substantively meaningful within the context of the current analysis. In any case, the different approaches to handle the 28 respondents would not alter the findings substantively.