Who Leads the Tango?: State Media, Social Media, and Nationalism

• In Event: Trip Through Your Wires: The Mediated Information Flow of Policy Content

Abstract

Nationalism is on the rise around the world and constitutes increasingly common populist mass movements. Although nationalism is widely regarded as an important source of legitimacy, we know little about the role state media play in facilitating nationalist mass movements, and more importantly, its potential ramifications on political mobilization and authoritarian resilience. We combine big data and experimental methods to understand the propagation of nationalism in China. Using unique Weibo data of more than 200,000 posts and 140,000 users that capture two milestone events of online nationalistic movements in 2016 and 2018, we find the role of state social media accounts played has changed drastically in the recent few years. Results from social network analysis show that the social media accounts of state media have evolved from a laissez-faire manner in 2016 to a much dominant and leading figure in 2018. In fact, the social media accounts of the Chinese Communist Youth League Central and People’s Daily, for example, have fueled populist mass movements in 2018 by presenting an official slogan and officially endorsing activists’ patriotist behaviors. Our finding suggests that the Chinese online public sphere has undergone dramatic changes from a decentralized to a recentralized structure in the past few years. By endorsing populist movements, the state may have facilitated the recent growth of nationalism in China.
We will next use an online field experiment to identify the effect of state endorsement in impacting individuals’ tendencies to participate in nationalistic movements. Thousands of Sina Weibo users are to be randomly assigned to messages that call for participating in nationalist movements, with or without mentioning the state media’s endorsement. Our experiment is scheduled to take place at Sina Weibo because it has been an important arena where activists gather and mobilize for nationalistic movements. In order to further identify the impact of participating in nationalistic movements in individuals’ political attitudes, we are about to conduct a survey among Weibo users who have participated in the two milestone nationalistic movements. Using an instrumental variable, we will be able to identify the causal mechanism of participating in nationalistic movements in influencing one’s national identities, political trust, and nationalistic orientation among others. Taken together, our study aims to provide systematic understandings of nationalism by examining how the state and activists interact, and more importantly, whether and how the state harvests legitimacy from the growth of nationalism.

Authors

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University

• Siyu Sun