Predicting Political Discussion in a Censored Virtual Environment

Abstract

Contrary to the optimistic view that the Internet would promote democracy in authoritarian countries like China, the pervasive political apathy among younger generations calls for a closer examination of micro-level individual political participation. This study contributes to the nascent body of empirical literature probing Chinese Internet users' political participation online by examining related behavioral and attitudinal factors. We argue that Chinese netizens' online participatory behaviors are determined by their political attitudes, trust in the media, and, chiefly, trust in the social system. Importantly, the current political and social environment in China seems to truncate any liberalizing potential of the Internet, as evidenced by the limited online political discussion and strong presence of government regulation. This dynamic implies that any utopian predictions concerning political participation online need to be reformulated in light of these external contextual factors.

Keywords:

• online political discussion
• censorship
• China

Notes

1. Considering the general political atmosphere in current China, a one-shot paper-and-pencil survey was considered a more secure research modality than an online survey.

2. Some of the original items were revised into a positive tone to reduce the political sensitivity of the survey instrument. In those cases, the items in question were recoded.

3. Since political discussion was measured at an ordinal level, OLS regression was not appropriate in that the assumption of a normal distribution was violated (Draper & Smith, 1998; Liao, 1994). In this case, ordinal logistic regression was the preferred analytical technique because it did not have stringent assumptions about our sample data and provided interpretable relationship coefficients. As such, an ordinal logistic regression was conducted to test the hypotheses.