Authoritarian regimes may adopt meritocratic political selection not to expand redistribution but to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by offering a credible path to socioeconomic advancement. This argument depends on the selection process being seen as inclusive and rule-based rather than arbitrary.
Health and safety standards provide a convenient public justification for government action while also creating ambiguity about intent. Although often studied as veiled protectionism, these standards can be deployed for goals beyond protecting domestic industry—most notably, as instruments of political pressure.
Conventional wisdom holds that business groups form to lobby for policy changes. This article advances a different claim: business interest groups can secure tangible, distributive benefits for member firms without advocating policy reforms. Introducing "broker theory," the piece conceptualizes interest groups as intermediaries that link member firms to political patrons who provide concrete favors.
Does the public in a rising authoritarian power overestimate their country’s reputation, power, and influence? This research uses three studies conducted around and after the COVID-19 pandemic to document whether Chinese citizens overestimate China’s global reputation and soft power, and whether simple information about actual international opinion can correct those perceptions and influence related evaluations.
Do climate-related extreme weather events change how people in China think about, know about, or pay attention to climate change? Xun Cao probes whether direct exposure to extreme events translates into greater concern, better knowledge, or more online attention to climate issues.
Zirui Yang asks why citizens in authoritarian regimes often express little opposition to censorship, despite the common view that censorship is a fundamentally repressive tool that should generate public backlash. The paper proposes a "normalization" mechanism: when censorship expands beyond clearly political threats (government criticism, collective action) to include mundane or nonpolitical topics, citizens become desensitized and less likely to object to either censorship itself or the regime that enforces it.
This paper asks how patron–client ties among officials affect information flows inside bureaucratic hierarchies. The authors argue that lower-level officials with patronage ties to higher-level leaders undertake informal information campaigns—sending signals of diligence and defending themselves—to compete for favors. Drawing on newly assembled Chinese sources, including a corpus of internal emails between city patrons and county clients and original data on county governments’ public replies to citizen complaints, the study compares communication patterns between client and non-client counties. The contribution is a descriptive account showing greater upward communication from client counties without detectable differences in public-facing complaint responses.
In the early 21st-century contest for influence in Africa, this study asks whether foreign aid translates into soft power: do Chinese and U.S. aid flows generate public affinity for donors and their values?
This study asks whether people living under authoritarianism form stable, constrained preferences across multiple policy domains and whether autocratic incentives to suppress preference formation prevent such stability. Using three surveys—two longitudinal—conducted in China, the authors examine intertemporal stability in a range of policy and value areas and report that many preferences show substantial stability over month-long and year-long intervals. The paper preserves caveats about measurement and context and offers recommendations for measuring preference configuration in authoritarian settings.
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.
Many assume authoritarian systems have limited global appeal. The central argument tested here is that global audiences will embrace authoritarian models when they believe autocracies can meet governance challenges better than democracies.
This paper asks how great powers compete for influence by comparing the goods they offer: the United States, it argues, sustains hierarchical patronage with multiple forms of inducement, while China challenges those relationships primarily through development finance. The authors reframe donor competition to consider whether recipients face costs when switching allegiances—costs that reduce the appeal of Beijing’s financing—and test whether existing American hierarchies make recipients less likely to receive Chinese funds.
This study asks whether affluence shapes bureaucratic responsiveness in an authoritarian setting without competitive elections. The focus is on how wealth at the neighborhood level affects how local governments handle municipal service problems in downtown Shanghai.
Founding leader personality cults are central to how some states tell stories about themselves and sustain popular loyalty. Paul Schuler, Trung-Anh Nguyen, Yongfeng Tang, and Mohammad Khan examine how these highly visible national narratives originate, asking whether cults always follow from a leader’s personal grab for power or can be intentionally created earlier for collective legitimation.
Authoritarian leaders rely on lower-level bureaucrats for information about society, but local officials can distort or filter that information before it reaches the center. Minh Trinh and Warren Wenzhi Lu ask when and why centralization reforms—designed to bypass local gatekeepers and improve information flow—succeed in reducing this distortion and when they fail.
This study asks how punishment of corruption shapes public support under authoritarian rule and tests two mechanisms: that punishment signals government capacity (instrumental) and that it signals moral commitment (deontological). Using an experimental mediation design embedded in a series of conjoint experiments in China, the authors present individual-level evidence about citizens’ evaluations of local officials who punish corrupt subordinates.
Loyalty to a dictator is often assumed to guarantee ruling group cohesiveness.
State-sponsored violence during the 1960s Cultural Revolution created enduring anti-government attitudes among Chinese citizens, a new study reveals.
Sudden government censorship can paradoxically increase information access for many citizens. This study examines social media data in China before and after Instagram's block, revealing a counterintuitive outcome: the ban motivated millions to adopt virtual private networks (VPNs). These tools provided ongoing access not just to Instagram but also enabled users to bypass longstanding restrictions on other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. While initially apolitical Wikipedia was accessed by these new VPN users, they quickly turned to blocked political content including Hong Kong protests and Chinese activist accounts. This demonstrates how censorship evasion technologies can expand information access beyond the immediately targeted platform.
This article examines propaganda-based threats of repression used by autocratic regimes, specifically China.
This study assesses whether publics outside the US and UK show the same "democratic bias"—reluctance to endorse force against democracies—that Tomz and Weeks (2013) documented for British and American respondents. The focus is on two emerging powers: Brazil (a democracy) and China (a non-democracy).
Foreign direct investment (FDI) into developing countries such as India and China often provokes domestic backlash. Rising protests and disruptive behavior have increased the salience of public opinion for FDI policy, making it important to understand how citizens form preferences about incoming projects.
Critics often portray China as an international patron that props up authoritarian governments. Julia Bader tests that claim directly by asking whether Chinese bilateral engagement actually strengthens the survival prospects of autocratic regimes.
Ka Zeng and Josh Eastin address a central debate in political economy and environmental politics: does international economic integration—through trade and foreign investment—worsen environmental outcomes by prompting jurisdictions to weaken standards, or can openness actually improve environmental protection by transmitting superior regulations and cleaner technologies?