Redistributive Propaganda Can Make Autocracies Appear More Democratic

This paper asks why autocrats commonly publicize redistributive policies and argues that such messaging helps sustain a façade of democracy. The authors' core claim is that many citizens understand democracy in terms of social equity rather than solely procedural rules; by highlighting equity-promoting policies, regimes can manipulate perceptions of how democratic they are. To evaluate this account, the study first analyzes extensive cross-national survey data to show that perceived social equity strongly predicts perceived democratic legitimacy. It then uses a preregistered survey experiment that exposes respondents in China to real-world redistributionist propaganda and finds that those exposed evaluated China’s democracy more positively. The authors present these findings as consistent with the argument that redistributionist propaganda can bolster apparent democratic legitimacy, while the abstract preserves the study's qualifications and avoids broader causal or generalizing claims beyond the reported analyses.