The forthcoming article “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” by Jiangnan Zhu, Steve Bai, Siqin Kang, Juan Wang, and Kaixiao Liu is summarized by the author(s) below.
In both democracies and autocracies, stringent state-sponsored social control has long been expected to provoke backlash from the public. However, recent empirical evidence challenges this assumption and reveals a counterintuitive pattern: citizens in authoritarian states could welcome, rather than resist, various forms of social control such as censorship or state repression. Why is this the case? Existing explanations primarily focus on the strategies employed by autocratic governments to manipulate the informational environment or exploit salient social cleavages. The government either convinces citizens that social control is beneficial or garners support by targeting specific subgroups within the domestic population.
However, can citizens support state repression even in the absence of government maneuvering? In this paper, we theorize an “authoritarian cue effect” and argue that instances of state repression might be interpreted as cueing messages that implicitly signal the regime’s disapproval of the punished behaviors. When the government punishes a behavior, citizens tend to perceive the repressed behavior as harmful to society, thus subsequently considering repression necessary. In other words, public opinion about repression, instead of static, can be murky, unstable and malleable. People employ instances of state repression as a baseline to infer whether the behavior has negative externalities for society.
Employing a novel belief correction survey experiment, we empirically record the cue effect of state repression. In our experiment, we presented around with six online speech scenarios and prompted them to speculate whether the individuals involved would be punished by the police. We only revealed the actual outcomes of these cases to the treatment group, who were informed that individuals in all six cases were detained by local police authorities, while the control group was not presented with the actual outcomes of these cases. Our results suggest that the treatment group perceived the behavior with more negative externalities; additionally, they also tended to support heavier regulation of online speech. The results have been tested for robustness across three waves of the experiment, involving approximately 3,000 respondents recruited from mainland China with diverse demographic backgrounds.
As such, this paper reveals a normatively dark picture about authoritarian politics by showing that authoritarian state repression might evade public opinion backlash in a less costly manner than previously presumed. The attitudinal effect of state repression creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: repression is “automatically” legitimized because it shifts citizens’ underlying perceptions of what unacceptable behavior is.
It should be noted that this cue effect might travel beyond the context of state repression and could potentially be extended to general policy-making in autocracies. If citizens, once informed of policies carried out by the government, might automatically adopt the regime’s position, the state is then unlikely to face public opinion backlash even when carrying out potentially unpopular policies. As such, the implications of our theory fundamentally challenge our understanding of contentious politics and public opinion in authoritarian states, which might largely underestimate authoritarian resilience.
About the Author(s): Jiangnan Zhu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong, Steve Bai is a Ph.D student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, Siqin Kang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen, Juan Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, and Kaixiao Liu is a Ph.D student in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Their research “Authoritarian cue effect of state repression” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
Speak Your Mind