Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T02:17:37.145Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Violence Exposure and Support for State Use of Force in a Non-Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

Yue Hou  and
Kai Quek
Yue Hou
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 133 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA, e-mail: yuehou@sas.upenn.edu
Kai Quek
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and Public Administration, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, e-mail: quek@hku.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How do individuals respond to internal security threats in non-democracies? Does violence make individuals more supportive of a strong state? Are the effects of violence on individual attitudes uniform, or are they heterogeneous with respect to the identity of the perpetrators? We field an online survey experiment on a national sample of Chinese citizens, in which respondents were randomly selected to view reports on violent acts in China. We show that exposure to violence makes individuals more supportive of a strong state: respondents randomly exposed to violence are more likely to approve police use of lethal force, and this effect is particularly strong among the less wealthy Han Chinese. We also find suggestive evidence that individuals exhibit intergroup biases in their reaction to violence.

Keywords

Public opinionviolenceChinasurvey experiment
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 120 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The research was approved by the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) at MIT. We thank Greg Distelhorst, Avery Goldstein, Guy Grossman, F. Daniel Hidalgo, Dorothy Kronick, Xiaojun Li, Hanzhang Liu, Peter Lorentzen, Dan Mattingly, Diana Mutz, Nicholas Sambanis, David Singer, Peichun Wang, Yiqing Xu, Wei Zhao, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Sources of financial support come from the Center for the Studies of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hong Kong. We declare no potential conflicts of interests. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at doi: 10.7910/DVN/G7F5VA (Hou and Quek 2018).

References

REFERENCES

Balcells, Laia and Torrats-Espinosa, Gerard. 2018. “Using a Natural Experiment to Estimate the Electrical Consequences of Terrorist Attacks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science - PNAS 115 (42): 10624–10629.Google Scholar
Berrebi, Claude and Klor, Esteban F. 2008. “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate.” American Political Science Review 102 (3): 279–301.Google Scholar
Bovingdon, Gardner. 2014. “Xinjiang.” In Politics in China: An Introduction, ed. Joseph, William. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bueno de Mesquita, Ethan. 2005. “The Quality of Terror.” American Journal of Political Science 49 (3): 515–530.Google Scholar
Chung, Chien-peng. 2006. “Confronting Terrorism and Other Evils in China: All Quiet on the Western Front?” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 4 (2): 75–87.Google Scholar
Coppock, Alexander, Leeper, Thomas J., and Mullinix, Kevin J.. 2018. “The Generalizability of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Across Samples.” Working Paper: 1–30. URL: https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/tjl-sharing/assets/HeterogeneousTreatmentEffects.pdfGoogle Scholar
Davenport, Christian. 1995. “Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An Inquiry into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions.” American Journal of Political Science 39 (3): 28–31.Google Scholar
Davis, Darren W. and Silver, Brian D.. 2004. “Civil Liberties vs Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America.” American Journal of Political Science 48 (1): 28–46.Google Scholar
Distelhorst, Greg and Hou, Yue. 2014. “Ingroup Bias in Official Behavior: A National Field Experiment in China.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 9 (2): 203–230.Google Scholar
Distelhorst, Greg and Hou, Yue. 2017. “Constituency Service Under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China.” Journal of Politics 79 (3): 1024–1040.Google Scholar
Easterly, William. 2001. “The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development.” Journal of Economic Growth 6 (4): 317–335.Google Scholar
Gadarian, Shana Kushner. 2010. “The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes.” The Journal of Politics 72 (2): 469–83.Google Scholar
Hersh, Eitan D. 2013. “Long-term Effect of September 11 on the Political Behavior of Victims’ Families and Neighbors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (52): 20959–20963.Google Scholar
Hetherington, Marc and Weiler, Jonathan. 2009. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hou, Yue. 2017. “Bringing Together the Studies of Ethnic Prejudice and Conflict in Chinese Politics.” Comparative Politics Newsletter 27 (2): 28–31.Google Scholar
Hou, Yue and Quek, Kai. 2018. “Replication Data for: Violence Exposure and Support for State Use of Force in a Non-Democracy.” Harvard Dataverse, V1. URL: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G7F5VAGoogle Scholar
Huang, Haifeng. 2015. “International Knowledge and Domestic Evaluations in a Changing Society: The Case of China.” American Political Science Review 109 (3): 613–634.Google Scholar
Huang, Haifeng. 2018. “The Pathology of Hard Propaganda.” The Journal of Politics 80 (3): 1034–1038.Google Scholar
Krueger, Alan. 2017. What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Xiaojun, Shi, Weiyi, and Zhu, Boliang. 2018. “The Face of Internet Recruitment: Evaluating Labor Markets of Online Crowdsourcing Platforms in China.” Research and Politics 5 (1): 1–8.Google Scholar
Lorentzen, Peter. 2013. “Regularizing Rioting: Permitting Public Protest in an Authoritarian Regime.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8 (2): 127–158.Google Scholar
Lyall, Jason, Blair, Graeme, and Imai, Kosuke. 2013. “Explaining Support for Combatants During Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan.” American Political Science Review 107 (4): 679–705.Google Scholar
Mutz, Diana and Pemantle, Robin. 2015. “Standards for Experimental Research: Encouraging a Better Understanding of Experimental Methods.” Journal of Experimental Political Science 2 (2): 192–215.Google Scholar
Mutz, Diana, Pemantle, Robin, and Pham, Phillip. 2017. “The Perils of Balance Testing in Experimental Design: Messy Analyses of Clean Data.” The American Statistician: 1–11.Google Scholar
Panagopoulos, Costas. 2006. “The Polls-Trends: Arab and Muslim Americans and Islam in the Aftermath of 9/11.” Public Opinion Quarterly 70 (4): 608–624.Google Scholar
Peffley, Mark, Knigge, Pia, and Hurwitz, Jon. 2001. “A Multiple Values Model of Political Tolerance.” Political Research Quarterly 54 (2): 379–406.Google Scholar
Phillips, Tom. 2014. “Beijing Assembles People's Army to Crush China Terrorists with an Iron Fist.”. The Telegraph UK, Retrieved March 26, 2015. URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10978406/Beijing-assembles-peoples-army-to-crush-China-terrorists-with-an-iron-fist.htmlGoogle Scholar
Potter, Philip 2013. “Terrorism in China: Growing Threats with Global Implications.” Strategic Studies Quarterly Winter.Google Scholar
Potter, Philip and Wang, Chen. 2018. “Censoring Uncertainty: How the Official Chinese Media Strategically Covers Domestic Terrorism.” Working Paper: 1–38.Google Scholar
Shirk, Susan. 2014. “The Domestic Context of Chinese Foreign Security Policies.” In Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia, ed. Pekkanen, Aadia M., Ravenhill, John, and Foot, Rosemary. New York: Oxford University Press. 391–411.Google Scholar
Sniderman, Paul M., Fletcher, Joseph F., Russell, Peter H., and Tetlock, Philip E.. 1996. The Clash of Rights: Liberty, Equality, and Legitimacy in Pluralist Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sniderman, Paul M., Hagendoorn, Louk, and Prior, Markus. 2004. “Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities.” American Political Science Review 98 (1): 35–49.Google Scholar
Truex, Rory. 2017. “Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (3): 329–361.Google Scholar
Wang, Yuhua. 2014. “Empowering the Police: How the Chinese Communist Party Manages Its Coercive Leaders.” The China Quarterly 219: 625–648.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Hou and Quek Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/G7F5VA
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Hou and Quek supplementary material

Appendix

Download Hou and Quek supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 107.8 KB