📢 Please note: The lecture has been cancelled.
Conventional accounts of authoritarian politics argue that elites prioritize political survival, not ideology. In this paper, we challenge that view by demonstrating how ideology shapes elite competition in China. We argue that autocratic leaders like Xi Jinping use ideology to signal policy preferences and rely on personal networks to identify officials aligned with their ideological vision. We build a new dataset of over 50,000 speeches and 40,000 policy documents from local officials in China and develop a novel method to measure ideological alignment with Xi. We find that elite conflict revolves around socialism and economic issues. Local officials with personal ties to Xi who publicly align with his socialist ideology are more likely to advance in their careers. They are also more likely to implement socialist policies, with negative consequences for economic growth. These findings suggest that, contrary to dominant theories, ideology plays a central role in structuring elite politics under authoritarianism.