This study challenges democratic citizenship theory by examining altruistic behaviour in authoritarian China. We find that financial resources influence prosocial engagement primarily through psychological mediators such as long-term planning and self-discovery, rather than directly providing material means for participation. Communist Party membership shapes specific domestic ideological orientations, but not attitudes toward market regulation or income equality, while cultural tradition emerges as a stronger predictor of certain political attitudes than party affiliation. Cluster analysis identifies three distinct citizen profiles: (1) future-oriented altruists; (2) status-driven contributors; and, (3) short-termpragmatists, revealing motivational heterogeneity within authoritarian publics. These findings suggest that authoritarian citizenship operates through psychological mediation and plural motivational pathways fundamentally different from democratic societies, with potential applicability to other single-party regimes where states actively structure prosocial behaviour. The study contributes to comparative authoritarianism literature by theorizing how regime type moderates the relationship between socio-economic resources, political identity, and civic engagement.

We investigate the role of evidence-based information in shaping individuals’preferences for trade policies through a series of survey experiments that contain randomized information treatments. Each treatment provides a concise statement of economics research findings on how openness to trade has affected labor market outcomes or goods prices. Across annual surveys from 2018-2022, each administered to a representative sample of the U.S. general population, we find that information influences trade policy preferences in complex ways. Information highlighting the link between trade and manufacturing job losses significantly raises expressed preferences for more limits on trade. Strikingly, information on the price benefits of trade (or the cost of tariffs) also induces protectionist policy choices, indicating that these preferences do not respond symmetrically to information on the gains versus losses from trade. We find evidence that these expressed preferences are driven in part by how the received information interacts with one's political identity, resulting in prior-biased belief updating, as well as by pre-existingconcerns over the impact on American jobs and over trade with China. Information that solely communicates the benefits of trade is thus unlikely to succeed unless it addresses these prior beliefs and concerns.