Myths or Signaling? Effects of Soft and Hard Propaganda on Chinese Officials

• In Event: Information and Misinformation in Autocracy: Evidence from China

Abstract

A burgeoning literature draws on how political propaganda shapes citizens’ beliefs. Some scholars focus on soft propaganda that attempts to convince ordinary citizens with false, agitative, or mythical claims. Other studies examine hard propaganda that attempts to signal the regime’s strength, legitimacy, or coercive power, which help deter dissidents from attending rebellions. Still, two critical questions remain unanswered. First, we do not know whether soft or hard propaganda is more effective to convince people. Second, we are agnostic about how political propaganda affects political elites’ beliefs. Authoritarian rulers have long used propaganda to mobilize elites, overcome intra-elite divisions, and forge consensus. While authoritarian elites are regime insiders and more politically relevant than ordinary citizens in authoritarian contexts, existing studies, however, almost exclusively focus on mass propaganda.

This paper explores how soft and hard propaganda affect statist preferences among local officials in China, who play a critical role in property rights protection. As an ideology, statism justifies the predominance of the public sector in the Chinese economy. To discern the effect of soft propaganda and that of hard propaganda on statism, we conduct an original survey experiment among participants of short-term executive training courses at a prestigious university in China. Subjects are randomly assigned to read nothing, a soft propaganda message, and a hard propaganda message about the importance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Both soft and hard propaganda are direct quotes of Xi Jinping. The soft propaganda message attempts to convince them that SOEs should play a dominant role in the national economy because they are more capable of achieving strategic goals. The hard propaganda message, however, states explicitly that SOEs, as the dominant actor in the national economy, are foundations of the single-party rule. We subsequently measure their attitudes on different forms of firms and behavioral bias that favors SOEs.

This research project aims to make three contributions to the literature. First, this paper complements the literature of propaganda by distinguishing the effects of soft and hard propaganda. Second, while existing studies of propaganda exclusively focus on ordinary citizens, our paper presents empirical evidence that propaganda, as a critical instrument of ideological campaigning and mobilization, could also play an important role in shaping authoritarian elites’ opinions and behavior. Finally, this paper complements the literature on elite politics by identifying the origins of elites’ ideology. Several previous studies explore how elites’ collective action shapes policy-making and how lower-level elites’ preferences affect policy implementation in non-democracies. This paper, however, shows how authoritarian rulers shape lower-level elites opinions and potentially impede their collective action with empirical and experimental evidence.

Authors

• Fengming Lu, Princeton University

• Xiao Ma, Peking University