Beloved Governments: Authoritarian Regimes' Toolkit for Building Popular Support
Open Access
- Author:
- Dai, Yaoyao
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 01, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Matthew Richard Golder, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Matthew Richard Golder, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Boliang Zhu, Committee Member
Sona Nadenichek Golder, Committee Member
Jonathan Eran Abel, Outside Member
Wenfang Tang, Special Member - Keywords:
- Authoritarian Regimes
Public Opinion
Preference Falsification
Information Manipulation
Propaganda
Anti-Corruption Campaigns - Abstract:
- While authoritarian regimes lack popular consent by definition, many of them are among the countries with the highest levels of popular support. In this four-paper dissertation, I examine various overlooked strategies that are commonly used by authoritarian regimes to shape citizens' perceptions of their government and to influence the public's opinion towards the regime. In the first paper on anti-corruption campaigns, I show that popular support for the government depends in a conditional way on the perceived effectiveness AND motivation of the anti-corruption campaigns. Due to possible preference falsification, anti-corruption campaigns that are perceived as targeting political rivals increase reported support for the government but not necessarily actual support. In the second paper, I separate the actual levels of support and reported levels of support for the government using a list experiment. I find that respondents who are coopted by the government have higher actual support for the regime and are less likely to inflate their support in public while respondents who experienced repression in the past have low actual support for the regime but are more likely to report inflated support for the regime. In the third paper, I examine a new form of propaganda, native political advertising, in which political actors buy space in independent media outlets to publish advertisements that are camouflaged as standard news stories. I provide the first theoretical framework and empirical evidence on how governments can use native political advertising to influence public opinion both domestically and abroad. In the fourth paper, I examine the strategic use of populism in authoritarian regimes and challenge the conventional wisdom that populism is rare under authoritarian rule. I also provide the first comparative and generalizable way of measuring populist rhetoric using text data.