The Pathology of Hard Propaganda

Abstract

Authoritarian governments often impose crude and heavy-handed propaganda messages on society. Is such hard propaganda effective in sustaining authoritarian rule? With an original survey experiment featuring messages from China's ongoing propaganda campaign, this study finds that hard propaganda can backfire and worsen citizens' opinions of the regime, while at the same time signaling the state's power and reducing citizens' willingness to protest. Thus, hard propaganda can deter dissent and help maintain regime stability in the short term, but it can also decrease regime legitimacy and aggravate the government's long-term prospects, especially when its power and control capacity do not keep up with propaganda.

Are Informal Education Facilities Effective Means for Generating Political Support? A Spatial Analysis*

“…On the other hand, the findings also reveal the uniqueness of the informal education impact when compared to regular propaganda channels, especially formal education. As shown in the empirical tests, the obedience-enforcement effect apparent in formal education does not explain the impact of PEDBs (Huang, 2015). These findings request scholars to rethink about the role of propaganda in authoritarian governance.…”

“…Nonetheless, these findings are consistent with findings in media propaganda. For instance, Chen and Shi () found that more frequent exposure to media propaganda (in the temporal dimension) reduces people's political trust in the government (see also Huang, ). This study manifests that the same mechanism also exists in the spatial dimension and can affect more than political trust but also support for the regime and obedience to the government.…”

“…The third theory argues for a perverse or backfire effect. Repeated exposure to propaganda with similar theme or content can cause people's cognitive fatigue or “heighten people's awareness of the regime's absurdity and the country's political plight” (Huang, :3). The theory thus suggests: H 3 :More exposure to the political propaganda will not enhance but reduce public political support for and obedience to the political regime. …”

“…According to this theory, instead of enhancing the positive attitudes of the public toward the government, propaganda shows the government's power to prevent protests. Huang (2015) illustrated this theory with an experimental study of formal education in China. The study found that the Chinese college students who were predominantly taught formal political knowledge (the treatment group) were not more satisfied with the government but held a stronger belief in its ability to maintain political order, compared to the control group in which the knowledge was not taught.…”

Updating with Others: Testing the Effect of Informational Social Influence on Political Attitudes

“…For example, scholars could apply a similar experimental design when studying misperceptions concerning climate change (Nisbet, Cooper, and Garrett 2015), police violence and the criminal justice system (Esberg, Mummolo, and Westwood n.d.), immigration (Hopkins, Sides, and Citrin 2019), or issues related to health-care response (Deslatte 2020;Lewandowsky et al 2012). Outside of the U.S. context, scholars who focus on issues related to "fact checking" or propaganda (Graves and Cherubini 2016;Huang 2018) may also benefit from considering the role of ISI in modifying the effects of misperceptions. Regardless of the issue domain or context, our research encourages scholars to further consider the social context within which misinformation and corrections are embedded.…”