Replication Data for: Can followers detect political leaders who cheat? Testing an evolutionary position

Scholars using evolutionary theory to study political psychology find that the average citizen in democracies is unable to choose between political leaders according to their ideologies. Rather, citizens turn to perceptions of procedural fairness during public decision-making when evaluating their leaders. We retest such evolutionary propositions in China using eight Wason selection experiments: In autocracies where accountability systems are lacking, little is known about how citizens judge politicians’ ideologies and their cheating behaviors. Results show that Chinese citizens are incapable of identifying political leaders’ ideological orientations; instead, they activate a cheater-detection system to distinguish between political leaders according to their adherence to procedural fairness principles. The findings advance our understanding of citizens’ democratic competence and followers’ cognitive abilities in autocracies.copy directly from abstract in PSRM publication