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Journal of Chinese Political Science

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01-04-2020 | Research Article

Rules Consciousness or Rights Consciousness? A Structural Equation Model of the Relationship between Sociopolitical Values and the Protest Potential among Chinese Citizens

Author: Meixi Zhuang

Published in: Journal of Chinese Political Science | Issue 3/2020

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Abstract

Research on protests and social movements in China has mushroomed alongside the rising occurrences of mass incidents. What drives up citizens’ protest potential, however, has led to two competing theories: the “rights consciousness” view and the “rules consciousness” view. By fitting structural equation model on a nationally representative survey dataset, this paper specifies and estimates these two competing explanations of an individual’s protest potential. This paper finds that rights consciousness drives up individuals’ propensity to protest, whereas rules consciousness depresses it. Furthermore, this paper shows latent measures/social values instead of explicit measures/political values to be effective predictors of protest potential. These research findings have important implications for comparative research on the relationship between values and political behavior in authoritarian regimes beyond the China case.

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For the path model, this study chooses some commonly-used measures as goodness-of-fit criteria, including the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), the chi-square and degrees of freedom, the comparative fit index (CFI) and The Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI). The Chi-square is sensitive to sample size. With large sample size, the Chi-square values will be inflated and the p value will drop accordingly, which erroneously implies a poor data-to-model fit [42]. To overcome this deficiency, this study uses relative Chi-square fit index (Chi-square/ degrees of freedom ratio, CMIN/DF). The common practice has been using ratio ranging from 2 to 5 for a reasonable fit. According to the general guidelines for the interpretation of RMSEA, values in the range of 0.00 to 0.05 present close fit, 0.05 and 0.08 present good fit, 0.08 and 0.10 indicates a mediocre fit, and above 0.10 present unacceptable fit. A lower Chi-square value indicates a better fit, whereas a larger degree of freedom indicates a higher parsimonious model. As a rule of thumb, CFI and TLI value close to 1 indicates a very good fit.

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Title: Rules Consciousness or Rights Consciousness? A Structural Equation Model of the Relationship between Sociopolitical Values and the Protest Potential among Chinese Citizens
Author: Meixi Zhuang
Publication date: 01-04-2020
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Journal of Chinese Political Science / Issue 3/2020
Print ISSN: 1080-6954
Electronic ISSN: 1874-6357
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-020-09663-x

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