This study investigates the relationship between the confidence in the Chinese government and internet usage of Chinese citizens. The number of internet users is large and keeps growing in China, but so does the amount of internet censorship. Previous research has suggested that internet usage tends to make citizens more sceptical towards authoritarian regimes. The aim with this study was to find out if this theory can be proven when studying China. The government's popularity among the people and the effective censorship of the internet makes China a least-likely case. This field should be examined because it is important to find out if citizens using the internet can potentially be of any threat to the world's most powerful authoritarian regime. By using the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer survey, a multiple regression was put together. The attitude towards the government was used as the dependant variable and internet usage as the independent variable with education, income, age, gender and location as control variables. The result shows that internet usage did correlate with respondents being more sceptical towards the government but the effect was not very strong. When including age in the multivariate regression the effect of internet usage halved, although the effect of internet usage remained statistically significant. The result of the study might indicate that internet usage in authoritarian regimes does make people a bit more sceptical towards the government, despite the internet being censored.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-384298 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Mether, August |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0109 seconds