Snowball survey of experts on Chinese politics

To capture the pool of experts on Chinese politics globally, we are conducting a snowball nomination process. This process is still ongoing, but we already have over 2,000 experts listed. These respondents are asked for a self-assessment of their level of expertise, as well as for suggestions for further experts we might not yet have in our data. We also collect some publicly available background information on each of the experts. This data provides us with a comprehensive overview of the world of China watchers and allows us to evaluate their network structure and connections.

We also examine the latter in our expert survey panel, where we ask experts about interactions with other experts. Because we collect information on both interactions and assessments of Chinese politics on a monthly basis, we can test if and how much the experts' relationships among each other influence their assessments in later periods. An experimental component in the survey is used to rule out alternative explanations for the observed similarity. The expert network data collected allows us to improve the aggregations of expert opinions, adjusting the uncertainty by incorporating inter-expert correlations, and downweighting experts who appear to be unduly influenced by others.

Based on this data, our first study argues that one possible source of bias are the experts' network of affiliations and interactions with each other, and that we should therefore make the social background and networks of country experts more transparent. We find that US-based and -educated male academics still form the core of this community, but that younger cohorts appear to be more diverse in terms of educational background, gender and geographic location. Our findings not just provide the first analysis of the global China Watcher community, but also speaks to current debates about the reliability of aggregated expert assessments.