| Summary/Abstract |
Using two survey experiments run on college students and average Chinese citizens respectively, this article revisits the impact of political wariness on public opinion surveys in contemporary China. The authors randomly assigned some respondents to a control group, in which face-to-face surveys were administered following the standard procedure endorsed by China’s academic survey industry. Remaining respondents were randomly assigned to experimental groups, in which the otherwise identical surveys were presented as affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Neither college students nor average citizens in the experimental groups showed a significantly higher non-response rate or reported more politically correct answers when probed for their assessments of China’s democratic quality and their trust in China’s political system. On the contrary, responding to possible cues conveyed by the CCP emblem interviewers wore (i.e. one of the treatments), college students significantly lowered their assessments of China’s democratic quality and raised their perceived need for fundamental changes in China’s political system; similarly, average citizens significantly downgraded their overall trust in the CCP. This research did not detect any significant influence of political wariness in the surveys.
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