Religion and (Public) Dissent: Evidence from China

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: Dimensions of Dissent: Protest in Contemporary China

Abstract

How does religion shape political dissent in autocracies? Theoretically, we distinguish between public and private dissent. We argue that the religious are the public dissenters: the citizens who are most likely to publicly express their opposition to repressive governments. Empirically, we focus on China. We conducted a pair of nationally representative surveys that probed citizens' political views with both direct questions and list experiments, which preserve respondents' anonymity. The list experiments reveal that, in private, religious and non-religious citizens have similarly negative views of the Chinese Communist Party. Under direct questioning, however, the religious are far more likely to express their opposition to the CCP than the non-religious. The religious, we find, are distinctive in three ways that motivate public dissent and decrease its costs: They are particularly sensitive to injustice, occupy social networks that foster coordination, and are more confident in their ability to affect change, despite confronting one of the world's most repressive governments. Strikingly, these results obtain across China's major religions. Most broadly, this paper helps understand why the religious are so often persecuted by the world's autocrats.

Authors

• Brett Logan Carter, University of Southern California

• Erin Baggott Carter, University of Southern California