Replication Data for The Politics of the Professoriate under an Authoritarian Context: Evidence from China

The political views of professors in Western democracies have been widely studied, but little is known about professors in authoritarian contexts. This paper offers the first quantitative analysis of the political opinions of Chinese professors, drawing on an online survey and employing Propensity Score Matching and Latent Class Modeling. Our findings make several contributions to both Chinese studies and scholarship on professoriate politics. First, we find that anti-regime and centrist professors outnumber pro-regime ones in China. Second, unlike their counterparts in Western democracies, who are way more liberal than the general public and display high ideological uniformity, Chinese professors’ ideological distribution is more balanced than that of Chinese citizens overall, highlighting the ideological diversity of academics under authoritarianism. Third, working as a professor in China is associated with a greater likelihood of opposing the authoritarian regime, offering new evidence for the faculty professional socialization theory in debates over the origins of professors’ political orientations. Finally, disciplinary differences matter: professors in the sciences and engineering, the professorial cohort has more political and social influence, express stronger nationalist attitudes than their peers in the humanities and social sciences. This cautions against assumptions that Chinese academics can be easily unified and mobilized to advance democratic reform.