Propaganda for Hearts in Autocracy

Abstract

Observers have long recognized that politicians appeal to citizens’ affect and emotions. Political scientists have actively explored the roles of affect in politics, yet we know surprisingly little about whether or how propaganda messages with different affective and emotional appeals lead citizens to hold more favorable attitudes toward authorities in autocracies. This study aims to examine the role core affect plays in facilitating propaganda in an authoritarian country. We argue that the valence of affect can influence how people perceive and process propaganda messages. For instance, negative affect prompts people to seek more information and endow higher trust in an authoritative figure, making individuals more likely to change their opinions toward supporting the regime. Positive affect can reinforce and amplify preexisting attitudes, arousing even stronger loyalty and deference to the regime. Where citizens tend to report higher trust toward authorities, we hypothesize that both positive and negative affect induced by the regime’s propaganda can strengthen such attitudes, but positive affect may be relatively more powerful. Leveraging the situation of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we conducted two sets of survey experiments in China to test our hypotheses. We found that disseminating propaganda messages through two different mediums, news articles and audio clips, generated more favorable citizen attitudes toward the regime. In addition, our causal mediation analysis provides initial evidence that positive affect can be a more effective mechanism than negative affect.