Stanford University

Cultivating the Appearance of Neutrality: Autocratic Propaganda in Africa and Asia

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Abstract: 

How do autocrats manipulate the beliefs of their citizens during political crises? We argue that they cultivate a reputation for neutrality so that, during moments of crisis, their pro-regime arguments have some measure of credibility. To test the argument, we employ a corpus of 24 state-affiliated newspapers from Africa and Asia. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we find that propaganda in autocracies is generally indistinguishable from state-affiliated newspapers in democracies, save for the 15 days prior to an election, when positive coverage of the autocrat and the ruling party triples. This increase, we show, is driven not by more effusive articles, but an increase in the share of articles about the regime. Consequently, the aggregate volume of pro-regime coverage increases, but per article positive coverage does not. We find no evidence that autocrats employ propaganda to issue threats of repression during election seasons, and that their propaganda apparatuses generally avoid defaming the opposition. State-affiliated newspapers in democracies -- much like their autocratic counterparts outside of election seasons -- exhibit generally neutral coverage.

Speaker Bio:

carter brett
Dr. Brett Carter is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California and co-PI of the Lab on Non-Democratic Politics. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was previously a fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as well as the Hoover Institution. His research focuses on autocratic politics in the Information Age. He is currently working on three book projects: one on autocratic survival in Post-Cold War Africa, one on autocratic propaganda, and one that exploits the Foreign Agents Registration Act to explore the role of autocratic money in American politics.
 

Brett Carter

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Brett Carter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a Faculty Affiliate at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he was a fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Carter studies politics in the world's autocracies. His first book, Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press), draws on the largest archive of state propaganda ever assembled — encompassing over eight million newspaper articles in six languages from nearly 60 countries around the world — to show how political institutions shape the propaganda strategies of repressive governments. It received the William Riker Prize for the Best Book in Political Economy, the International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award, Honorable Mention for the Gregory Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics, and Honorable Mention for the APSA Democracy & Autocracy Section's Best Book Award.

His second book, in progress, shows how politics in Africa’s autocracies changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and how a new era of geopolitical competition — marked by the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia — is changing them again.

Carter’s other work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs, among others. His work has been featured by The New York Times, The Economist, The National Interest, and NPR’s Radiolab.

Hoover Fellow
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2020-2021
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Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California
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States in the Developing World

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"What should states in the developing world do and how should they do it? How have states in the developing world addressed the challenges of promoting development, order, and inclusion? States in the developing world are supposed to build economies, control violence, and include the population. How they do so depends on historical origins and context as well as policy decisions. This volume presents a comprehensive theory of state capacity, what it consists of, and how it may be measured. With historical empirical illustrations it suggests that historical origins and political decisions help drive the capacity of states to meet their goals."

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Can Cash Boost Governance in Poor Countries?

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One policy option for countries reliant on natural resources is to share part of the revenues directly with citizens, an idea known as oil to cash. Technological innovation, such as biometric identification and mobile money, now allow direct payments to people on a massive scale. Additional changes in the global marketplace, experiments in India and Kenya, and shifting political views of cash transfers have all affected the potential of cash to boost governance.

 

Speaker Bio:

todd moss
Todd Moss is senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC and nonresident scholar at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute. A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Moss is the author of Oil to Cash: Fighting the Resource Curse with Cash Transfers and The Golden Hour, a diplomatic thriller set in West Africa.

Todd Moss Senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC
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The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s War on Drugs

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This paper provides an account of the strategies of extortion and co-optation used by drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) toward civil society in Mexico. Our theoretical approach focuses on levels of territorial contestation among armed actors, as well as state capture by DTOs, to explain variation in co-opting or coercing civil society. Through the use of list experiments in a nationally representative survey, the paper measures extortion and assistance by DTOs in Mexico. We find that territorial contestation among rival DTOs increases predation on civil society while reducing DTOs assistance, which is found to occur in uncontested municipalities. Additionally, we find that extortion is higher in municipalities where DTOs have captured the state. These results suggest that territorial contestation and state capture are important in determining the strategy toward civil society during drug wars.

 

Speaker Bio:

gustavo
Gustavo Robles is a Research Scholar for the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) at CDDRL. He finished his PhD in Political Science at Stanford University in 2017 with specialization in Political Methodology and Comparative Politics. His PhD dissertation focused on the dynamics and consequences of drug-related violence in Mexico. His research interests include the economics of crime and violence in Latin America, political economy of development, and legislative studies. He is involved in POVGOV’s projects on police accountability and use of force, crime and security, and violence prevention in Brazil and Mexico. He holds a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a BA in Economics and Political Science from ITAM.

Research Scholar for the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) at CDDRL
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Shameful Preferences and the Legitimization of Europe’s Far Right

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As the number of migrants in Europe has risen in recent years, far right parties have fuelled voters’ fears concerning what the influx will mean for their nations. This project utilizes paired pre-election polls and actual vote shares across state and regional elections pre- and postmigrant crisis to provide evidence that far right sympathists often practiced preference falsification prior to this legitimizing shock, but that the crisis reshaped the political conversation such that far right identification is no longer deemed politically shameful. Although the theoretical framework surrounding preference falsification is well developed in the social movement literature as well as in American politics, Laura Jakli argues that it has untapped parallels in the study of Europe's far right. She also embeds priming and list experiments in a Facebook survey to determine whether there is a significant difference between subjects' willingness to identify with the far right using explicit versus implicit measurement approaches.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Laura Jakli is a PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern European politics and political behavior. She has designed and implemented field experiments, internet-based survey experiments, and interview-based research in the US, Greece, and Hungary. Her dissertation examines the relationship between digital media polarization and individual-level attitude strength as well as aggregate-level electoral mobilization. The overall goal of her dissertation is to explain why recent far right voter turnout has been remarkably high relative to the underlying distribution of ideological adherents across the West. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA from UC Berkeley.

Laura Jakli PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley
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Planning for the Occupation of Japan (Event cancelled)

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The Allied occupation of Japan is remembered as the "good occupation." An American-led coalition successfully turned a militaristic enemy into a stable and democratic ally. Of course, the story was more complicated, but the occupation did forge one of the most enduring relationships in the postwar world. Recent events, from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to protests over American bases in Japan to increasingly aggressive territorial disputes between Asian nations over islands in the Pacific, have brought attention back to the subject of the occupation of Japan. But where did occupation policy come from? This talk considers the role of presidents, bureaucrats, think tanks, the media, and Congress as part of an informal policy network created to manage the postwar world during World War II.

 

Speaker Bio:

dbarnes1
Dr. Dayna Barnes is a specialist in 20th century international history, American foreign policy, and East Asia. She is a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and is an incoming assistant professor of history at City, University of London. Her book, Architects of Occupation: American Experts and the Planning for Postwar Japan, was published in Cornell University Press in March 2017.

Dana Barnes Visiting scholar at CDDRL
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The Future of Globalization

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The populist backlash against globalization is being felt acutely across Europe as well as here in the US. And yet whether you look at it from an economic, political or military perspective, transnational cooperation has become an integral part of our global landscape. Hear CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama on the future of globalization for World Affairs. 

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Deconstructing World Culture: The rise of legal restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, 1994-2015

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There is a growing backlash against the liberal and neoliberal economic, political and social ideologies that have dominated the globe since the 1980s. On economic fronts, critiques of free-market, privatization, and deregulation policies are on the rise, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. Even mainstream economists at the International Monetary Fund now report that the benefits of neoliberalism have been “oversold” and may contribute to increasing inequality. On political fronts, we see a decline in liberal democracy; for instance, Freedom House reports that more countries have experienced losses than gains in freedoms since 2005. We argue that just as there is a groundswell of opposition against dominant global economic and political ideologies, there is rising resistance to the social dimensions of a world culture rooted in Western liberalism. To illustrate our argument, we examine the rise of legal restrictions on foreign funding to non-governmental organizations in more than 50 countries over the period 1994-2015.

Speaker Bio:

bromley patricia gse
Patricia Bromley is an Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Her work has focused on the rise and globalization of a culture emphasizing rational, scientific thinking and expansive forms of rights. It spans a range of fields including comparative education, organization theory, the sociology of education, and public administration and policy. A recent book, Hyper-organization: Worldwide organizational expansion, explains the global proliferation of organization, both in numbers and internal complexity (Oxford University Press 2015, with J.W. Meyer). Other recent publications appear in American Sociological Review, Administration & Society, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

Patricia Bromley Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University.
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Development and entrepreneurship in Cuba: A talk with the winners of 10x10KCuba

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Join Professor Larry Diamond and the winners of the 10x10K Cuba competition for a talk on the emerging entrepreneurial scene in Cuba. The 10x10K Cuba is an international competition seeking to help talented programmers and entrepreneurs in Cuba. This event will feature Janse Lazo Valdes and Victor Manuel Moratón, the entrepreneurs leading the startups MiKMa and NinjaCuba.

 

Speaker(s) Bio:

Janse Lazo Valdes is a Computer Science engineer from the Havana University of Technologies José Antonio Echeverría. Valdes and his team Sírvete participated in Havana’s first Startup Weekend, coming in 2nd place. At Stanford, he is hoping to learn more about business opportunities, marketing, human resources, and leadership to promote entrepreneurship and development in Cuba. Valdes is representing the startup MiKMa.

MiKMa is a startup that will guarantee the advertising of houses for rent in national currency in Cuba and hopes to revolutionize the way in which the user makes the reservations of these properties.

 

Victor Manuel Moratón is a Computer Science engineer from the Havana University of Technologies José Antonio Echevarría. He specializes in software development and is the product developer of Ninjas Cuba. At Stanford, he wants to represent the emerging entrepreneurial Cuban community and meet leaders in the sector of entrepreneurship and development. Moratón is representing the startup NinjaCuba.

NinjaCuba is a website oriented to the search of talents of computer science in Cuba thought for the thousands of computer engineers, cybernetics, designers, companies and groups of development. NinjaCuba hopes to connect people in the technology space with employment opportunities.

 

development and entrepreneurship in cuba

Janse Lazo Valdes Computer Science Engineer, Havana University of Technologies José Antonio Echeverría
Victor Manuel Moratón Computer Science Engineer, Havana University of Technologies José Antonio Echevarría.
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