Differential Effects of Propaganda: A Field Experiment in Hong Kong

• In Event: Political Knowledge and Propaganda

Abstract

In this study, we explore the differential effects of propaganda. Specifically, we ask whether more nuanced and moderate biased media messaging might be more persuasive than hard propaganda. We also explore propaganda effects on individuals with different priors. In an effort to advance existing work we incorporate sources with different levels of bias and individuals with heterogenous priors into our field experiment by design to allow for causal identification of these effects.

The experiment takes place in what in recent years has emerged as the test case for the effectiveness of authoritarian propaganda – Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China. As the Chinese government has sought to integrate Hong Kong more tightly with the mainland it has moved to diminish the freedom of speech there and has made efforts to replace local, traditionally free, media with a variety of, notionally independent, but biased pro-mainland newspapers and television channels. Of importance to this study is the fact that the Hong Kong media landscape is now home to several pro-mainland newspapers with various degrees of bias. The city of Hong Kong itself is home both to native residents, most of whom grew up in a relatively free media environment, and also a large and growing population of Chinese mainlanders whose political priors had been shaped by mainland institutions.

Our study builds on this theoretically important naturally occurring variation in Hong Kong. The field experiment takes place around the time of the election of the region’s chief executive in March 2022 when we expect that there will be a heightened interest in politics and pro-mainland media will likely work hard to promote the candidate favored by the Chinese Communist Party. We plan to recruit an equal number of Hong Kong-native and mainland students at the Hong Kong University for Science and Technology (HKUST) into the study and randomly assign them to receive regular news coverage over the span of three weeks by two pro-mainland media sources, one moderate and another heavily biased. Students will be incentivized to consume news articles through quizzes with prize draws. At the conclusion of the study, we will measure the effect of the consumption of the two media sources on attitudes toward the Communist Party and its leadership, attitudes toward the Hong Kong chief executive and administration, political activism levels, and willingness to donate to various political causes. We will compare the treatment effect to an untreated baseline group separately within the Hong Kong and mainland-native populations and also treatment effects between the two population groups. Overall, 720 students will be recruited to participate in the study.

Authors

• Ruilin Lai, Washington University in St. Louis

• Leonid V. Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi