Voter Perceptions and Candidate Support in Middle-Income Democracies

• In Event: Chinese Politics Mini-Conference: China’s Role in International Relations and Its Worldwide Impacts

Abstract

This paper examines what voters in the global South think of China and how their perceptions of China shape their support for political candidates. Through large-scale, population-representative surveys in eight countries across South America and Southeast Asia (N=19,200), we examine two interrelated research questions: (1) What do voters in the global South think about when they think about “China”? (2) How do these perceptions of China shape how voters evaluate presidential candidates? We focus on large, middle-income democracies (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand) to capture populations that are substantively significant and understudied, and in countries that have substantial political and economic ties with China. This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, existing research on global China has produced conflicting and incomplete narratives regarding perceptions of China in the global South. Second, we contribute to a small body of cross-national studies on how public perceptions of foreign countries influence support for political candidates.

Authors

• Kerry Ratigan, Amherst College

• David Janoff Bulman, Johns Hopkins University

• Ning Leng, Georgetown University