Public Opinion and Political Trust in Post-Communist Countries

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

Five surveys examine public opinion and political trust in China and Russia, as well as propaganda used by the Chinese and Russian states. Li’s paper shows that the draconian zero-COVID policy has an inverse-U correlation with political trust in China. Cheng and Yue’s survey shows that Han Chinese respondents do not discriminate between complaints about the government based on the author's ethnicity (Han or Uyghur). Zhang and Kotska’s paper shows how propaganda of digital technologies shapes people’s willingness to share privacy data with authorities. DeSisto, Soroka and Krawatzek examine the socio-political attitudes of Russians who fled Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Achilov and Kursuncu investigate the online persuasion dynamics used by the Russian government in the transnational context.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Post-February 2022 Russian Migrant Attitudes: Evidence from Armenia and Georgia - George Soroka, Harvard University; Isabelle DeSisto, Princeton University; Félix Krawatzek, Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS)

• The Impact of the Zero-COVID policy on Political Trust in China - Lianjiang Li, University of Hong Kong

• Empathy, Linked Fate and the Han-Uyghur Relations: A Survey Experiment in China - Chao-yo Cheng, Birkbeck, University of London; Jiahua Yue

• Propaganda in Digital Authoritarianism: How Are Chinese Citizens Persuaded? - Hao Zhang, Freie Universität Berlin; Genia Kostka, Freie Universität Berlin

• When War is Not a “War”: Analyzing Russian State-Sponsored Online Propaganda - Dilshod Achilov, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth; Ugur Kursuncu, University of South Carolina

Chair

• Rachel Vanderhill Wofford College

Discussants

• Xiao Ma Peking University

• Rachel Vanderhill Wofford College