Propaganda as Signaling

Huang, Haifeng

doi:10.5129/001041515816103220

Cited by 211 publications

(130 citation statements)

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“…1 In contrast, we show how information spread among citizens can benefit the regime by helping citizens organize collective action, which releases social pressure and disciplines government officials. Other recent studies of authoritarian information politics focus on how propaganda or censorship affects a regime’s direct interactions with citizens and, consequently, its maintenance of power (Edmond 2013; Gehlbach and Sonin 2014; Guriev and Treisman 2015; Huang 2015; Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2015; Chen and Xu Forthcoming), whereas we study how information flow affects the regime through its impact on the behavior of lower officials, similar to Egorov, Guriev and Sonin (2009) and Lorentzen (2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Media, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience

Huang¹,

Boranbay-Akan²,

Huang³

2016

PSRM

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Do authoritarian governments always censor news about protests to prevent unrest from spreading? Existing research on authoritarian politics stresses the danger that information spread within the society poses for a regime. In particular, media and Internet reports of social unrest are deemed to threaten authoritarian rule, as such reports may incite more protests and thus spread instability. We show that such reasoning is incomplete if social protests are targeted at local officials. Allowing media the freedom to report local protests may indeed lead to protest diffusion, but the increased probability of citizen protest also has two potential benefits for the regime: (1) identifying and addressing more social grievances, thus releasing potential revolutionary pressure on the regime; (2) forcing local officials to reduce misbehavior, thus reducing underlying social grievances. For authoritarian governments whose survival is vulnerable to citizen grievances, allowing the media to report social protests aimed at local governments can therefore enhance regime stability and protect its interests under many circumstances. We construct a game-theoretic model to analyze the problem and illustrate the argument with examples from China.

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confidence: 99%

Media, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience

Huang¹,

Boranbay-Akan²,

Huang³

2016

PSRM

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“…The specificity of authoritarian regimes brought more attention to the issues associated with the effectiveness of media control in shaping public opinion and maintaining popular support for authoritarian leaders. This literature has been developed largely by looking into the censorship and propaganda efforts of the Chinese government (Huang 2015;King, Pan, and Roberts 2017;Stockmann and Gallagher 2011) and has been enriched by recent studies of propaganda, news framing, and media control in Putin's Russia (Rozenas and Stukal 2019;Stukal et al 2017;Gehlbach 2010;Lipman 2009).…”

Section: The Analytical Leverage Of the Social Identity Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Opinion Formation and Group Identity: The Politics of National Identity Salience in Post-Crimea Russia

Sharafutdinova

2020

Problems of Post-Communism

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The sociological, group-based factors of public opinion formation are often omitted from models of public opinion that rely on survey methodology. This study employs social identity theory and focus group interview technique to demonstrate the value-added from an alternative approach to the issue of opinion formation in authoritarian regimes. The empirical focus is on public opinion in post-Crimea Russia. The focus group interviews conducted in 2016 in two Russian cities reveal the effects of national identity salience and the implications of "depersonalized" political opinion formation in post-Crimea Russia. The study speaks to the increasing repertoire of legitimation mechanisms that modern, "informational" autocrats can rely on in the context of controlled media and public sphere.

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“…Government control of the media can also provide signals to citizens to follow the government line. Huang (2015) finds that propaganda in China can signal government strength and Stern and Hassid (2012) find that the ambiguous nature of off-limits information can induce risk-averse journalists to self-censor instead of spreading information. Censorship may even have adverse effects on information outside of a country by reducing incentives for citizens of other countries to engage in social media without a wider audience (Zhang and Zhu 2011).…”

Section: Censorship and Access To Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information

2018

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Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We delineate circumstances when increases in censorship expand access to information for a substantial subset of the population. When governments suddenly impose censorship on previously uncensored information, citizens accustomed to acquiring this information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion. These evasion tools provide continued access to the newly blocked information—and also extend users’ ability to access information that has long been censored. We illustrate this phenomenon using millions of individual-level actions of social media users in China before and after the block of Instagram. We show that the block inspired millions of Chinese users to acquire virtual private networks, and that these users subsequently joined censored websites like Twitter and Facebook. Despite initially being apolitical, these new users began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such as opposition protests in Hong Kong.

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Propaganda as Signaling

Cited by 211 publications

References 0 publications

Media, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience

Media, Protest Diffusion, and Authoritarian Resilience

Public Opinion Formation and Group Identity: The Politics of National Identity Salience in Post-Crimea Russia

How Sudden Censorship Can Increase Access to Information

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