In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan slant, do people rely on the congeniality of the news outlet to judge whether the information is true or false? In a survey experiment, we presented partisans (Democrats and Republicans) and ideologues (liberals and conservatives) with a news article excerpt that varied by source shown (CNN, Fox News, or no source) and content (true or false information), and measured their perceived accuracy of the information contained in the article. Our results suggest that the participants do not blindly judge the content of articles based on the news source, regardless of their own partisanship and ideology. Contrary to prevailing views on the polarization and politicization of news outlets, as well as on voters' growing propensity to engage in ‘partisan motivated reasoning,’ source cues are not as important as the information itself for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

The positive influence of foreign direct investment (FDI) on host countries' economic growth has been widely debated. Given the mixed empirical evidence, scholars have sought to find the economic preconditions under which FDI spillovers are likely to occur and facilitate economic growth in the host countries. Those preconditions are not exogenously dictated but largely shaped by governments' policy preferences. Particularly in autocracies, an autocrat's policy preferences are the driving force that determines whether a host country is likely to be equipped with growth-friendly institutions and policies. We argue that such economic institutions and policies are dependent on the time horizons of autocrats in power. Our empirical analysis covering 64 autocratic countries from 1970 to 2005 supports our main argument that FDI has a positive effect on growth when autocratic time horizons are sufficiently long, and positive FDI spillovers mainly occur through the protection of property right institutions.

Much political economy research examines how higher-level political representation of the constituent jurisdictions affects resource redistribution among the lower-level units in democracies, but little work has probed the redistributive consequences of regional political representation under dictatorship. This study investigates the effect of membership for provincial officials in the Politburo of the single-ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on fiscal resource flows between the central government and provincial governments in reform-era China. I find robust evidence that the provinces overseen by CCP Politburo members tended to remit more budgetary revenues to the center but did not receive larger central budgetary subsidies. This is consistent with a territorial logic of authoritarian power-sharing in single-party states, which suggests that the regionally selective presence at a collective ruling-party decision-making forum for subnational officials aims at tighter political control to help induce greater policy compliance from below.