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How do people living under authoritarian rule organize their beliefs about politics? Are their political preferences still organized along ideological lines? My research focuses on understanding the structure of mass attitudes under autocracy, using new data from China. I show that ideology in China is loosely organized around a left-right economic dimension and an authoritarian-democratic political dimension, and that the most politically sophisticated individuals are the least likely to constrain their ideological preferences to one dimension. Contrary to what we might expect, ideological polarization in China is largely absent at the mass level. In a second paper, I investigate the relationship between ideology and political participation. Using a spatial model of choice, I discover that for most Chinese, perceived government competence is a bigger factor than ideological distance in political participation. The implication of the model is that the diffuse nature of public preferences gives the Communist party a free hand to implement its policy initiatives without alienating key constituencies. The last paper explores the meaning of ideological labels in China, using three national surveys. I find that while many Chinese citizens are willing to locate themselves on a left-right scale, the labels left and right do not carry a consistent programmatic meaning. Further analysis reveals that the partisan and symbolic content of these ideological labels is also limited. I argue that the absence of a shared ideological understanding prevents Chinese citizens from exercising political agency.

The idea of a left-right ideological dimension helps citizens and parties organize their thinking about politics. While the left-right dimension is traditionally organized around questions of inequality and change in democracies, its meaning under authoritarian rule remains uncertain. This paper uses two national surveys to investigate the policy, partisan, and symbolic content of the left-right dimension in China. The analysis of these surveys reveals that while many Chinese citizens are willing to locate themselves on the left-right scale, their placements are distorted by a variety of perceptual bias known as differential item functioning. The labels of left and right do not carry a consistent programmatic meaning, and the partisan and symbolic content of these ideological labels is limited. One implication of the absence of a shared ideological understanding is that it prevents Chinese citizens from developing the type of vocabulary necessary for exercising political agency.

In spatial models of political competition in democracies, citizens vote for the party or candidate that is the closest to their own ideological position, while in valence models, voters decide on the basis of non-policy factors, such as competence. What remains unclear, however, is whether citizens in authoritarian regimes use spatial or valence considerations to guide their decisions to participate in politics. This study uses data from the 2015 Chinese Urban Governance Survey to measure the ideology of Chinese citizens, and estimates an empirical stochastic model to explore how Chinese citizens use ideological distance and valence to determine how they want to participate in politics. The results show that valence issues, such as perceived government competence, play a larger role in political participation than ideology.