Awardee Interview: IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award (2024)

 

Award won:

• IJPP Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, 2024

 

Name(s) & affiliation:

• Erin Baggott Carter, University of Southern California and Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• Brett L. Carter, University of Southern California and Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

 

Publication reference:

• Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2023.

 

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

• The project has its origins in a series of conversations in 2015, when we realized just how profoundly different propaganda in China and Congo look to readers. We quickly realized no one had ever attempted to measure propaganda cross-nationally and there was no real explanation for why propaganda might differ so dramatically across countries. We set out to identify and collect as many state-run newspapers as possible, and we then used sentiment dictionaries to measure the valence of content surrounding government references. It all moved very quickly; it was extraordinarily exciting.

 

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

• The propaganda strategy an autocrat employs depends on the electoral constraints he confronts.
• Where these electoral constraints are relatively binding, autocrats must curry some amount of popular support, and so they employ propaganda to persuade citizens of regime merits. To be persuasive, however, propaganda apparatuses must cultivate the appearance of neutrality, which requires conceding bad news and policy failures. Where electoral constraints are binding, we find, propaganda apparatuses cover the regime much like Fox News covers Republicans.
• Where autocrats confront no electoral constraints – where autocrats can fully secure themselves with repression – propaganda serves not to persuade citizens but to dominate them. Propaganda derives its power from absurdity. By forcing citizens to consume content that everyone knows to be false, autocrats make their capacity for repression common knowledge. Propaganda apparatuses engage in effusive pro-regime coverage while pretending opposition does not exist. Narratives about a country’s contemporary history are presented in absurd terms, since these absurdities give them power. Citizens are told that their countries are envied around the world, that “democracy” is alive and vibrant, and that the dictator is a champion of national sports. Propaganda apparatuses routinely and explicitly threaten citizens with repression.

 

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

• This book draws on the first global dataset of autocratic propaganda, encompassing over 8 million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. We document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and the opposition, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it. We also show that propaganda discourages popular protests.

 

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

• Not sure we would do anything differently. We’re delighted with how the project turned out and are equally humbled and gratified with the reception. The most challenging part of the project was how sprawling it quickly became, given how rich our data was and how little prior work had sought to measure propaganda cross-nationally. Not sure we ever overcame that particular challenge, which is why the book is so long!

 

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

• The interest in propaganda has obviously boomed since we started the project in 2015, due to lots of things: the rise of computational social science, more sophisticated survey methods, and changes in the nature of dictatorship itself. The most fruitful direction, we think, is work that combines these three things: that uses cutting-edge tools to measure propaganda, takes seriously how citizens across the world respond to it, and works within a unified theoretical framework. There is lots of work that does one or two of those well, but much less that does all three. This sort of approach will also provide a foundation for understanding variation in propaganda – and responses to it – across time and space.

 

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

• We’ve returned to the book projects that were consuming us before we undertook Propaganda in Autocracies. Erin is working on a book about the US-China bilateral relationship. Brett is working on a book about autocratic politics in post-Cold War Africa. We’re in the early phases of a new, joint book project as well, about dissent and repression in China, which builds on some of our earlier research.