Personality and political discontent in China, with Rory Truex

This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser welcomes back Rory Truex, who teaches politics and international affairs at Princeton. In a fascinating as-yet-unpublished paper, Rory draws on extensive survey research that examines both political attitudes and personalities among Chinese participants and finds a strong correlation between political discontent and "isolating personality traits," like introversion, disagreeableness, and lack of close personal ties with others. Rory and Kaiser discuss the paper, the fascination with authoritarian resilience among Rory's cohort of China scholars, and the fertile intersection of psychology and politics.

4:03 – What's with the obsession among young China-focused political scientists with authoritarian resilience?

10:02 – The problem of "preference falsification" in social science research in China — and the solution!

16:29 – Rory describes the dataset and the approach behind his paper on personality and political discontent

33:14 – What do the personalities of Party members look like?

42:15 – Personality and politics in Russia vs. China

A transcript of this podcast is available at SupChina.com.

Recommendations:

Rory: The work of the Center for Security in Emerging Technology (CSET); and the Fan Brothers' oeuvre of children's books, including The Night Gardner and The Barnabus Project

Kaiser: The immensely popular daily word game Wordle

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