What Drives Media Use in Authoritarian Regimes? Extending Selective Exposure Theory to Iran

Abstract

Most work on selective exposure comes from the United States or other western democracies and typically examines partisan attitudes as the cognitive or motivational drivers of selectivity. This study extends the boundary conditions of existing literature by studying the factors affecting media choice in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a drastically understudied context. Within the overarching framework of motivated reasoning, we propose two theoretically relevant factors that should drive selective exposure into regime media or non-regime alternatives in authoritarian contexts: (1) system-justifying attitudes and (2) regime-sanctioned identities, here religiosity. Relying on two different surveys conducted within Iran in 2012 and 2016, we find that religiosity strongly predicts the reliance on non-regime media in both studies, whereas system-justifying attitudes predict selectivity in Study 2. Theoretical implications for the selectivity literature are discussed.

Rethinking Propaganda: How State Media Build Trust Through Belief Affirmation

“…By documenting biased perceptions of media and propaganda among Russians, my study joins a small but growing literature on political disagreements in information processing in autocracies (Robertson 2015;Chapman 2021;Huang and Yeh 2017;Wojcieszak et al 2018;Laebens and Öztürk 2020). I highlight how political dispositions prevent citizens from recognizing the lies of propaganda, even when its bias is obvious.…”

Walking Through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context

“…For example, to what extent a regime is viewed as democratic, fair, and open drives media selectivity and increases reliance on regime-sanctioned media sources. For example, Wojcieszak et al (2019) find that greater strength of system-justifying attitudes in Iran increases reliance on regime-controlled media at the expense of either regime-independent or foreign media. Likewise, it is people's perception rather than the institutional reality that explains how much media freedom is desired (Nisbet & Stoycheff, 2013).…”

“…Control Variables. Replicating previous research on MRC and media use in Iran (Behrouzian et al, 2016;Wojcieszak et al, 2019), we included several control variables as covariates in our analysis. The socio-demographic controls include age, educational attainment (measured on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = no formal schooling, 5 = having completed two or more years of graduate study) as well as dummy codes used for being female, employed, as well as self-identifying as being Persian and as Shi'a.…”

“…We propose three factors that directly and indirectly influence MRC in an authoritarian context: regime ideology, perceived supply of free media, and demand for media freedom. Lacking democratic pluralism and mechanisms, authoritarian regimes construct state-sponsored political identities that legitimize their control over society (Razi, 1990; Soest & Grauvogel, 2017; Wojcieszak et al, 2019). These regime ideologies are based on identities organic to a country or culture that are co-opted by authoritarian elites to legitimize their rule and define the political cleavage between those who support the regime and those who are critical of or oppose it (Soest & Grauvogel, 2017; Wojcieszak et al, 2019).…”

Moving Away From Partisanship: Diversifying the Motives Behind Political Polarization

“…Other research suggests that the opposite way of thinking, namely, the out-group favoritism and system-justification attitudes, may also lead to conflict and contradiction among social members, or even to a polarized society (e.g. Han, 2015; Wojcieszak et al, 2019).…”