Authoritarian Higher Ed: Evidence from State-Owned Media in Russia & China

• In Event: Media Strategies and Online Censorship in China and Russia

Abstract

Many authoritarian regimes heavily promote and invest in higher education, but we know little about why or about how these policies are promoted. In this paper, we examine how and why authoritarian regimes publicly justify their higher education policies. Spending figures fail to answer important questions about the nature and type of investments authoritarian regimes make in higher education and offer no insight into how non-democratic leaders promote these policies. Using an original dataset, we consider how higher education policies are justified in the state-owned media in Russia and China. We created a database of articles on higher education from the Xinhua News Agency and ITAR-Tass (gathered using NexisUni) which were then hand-coded by teams of researchers. We find that Chinese state-owned media focuses on decentralizing efforts in higher education and the experiences of Chinese students studying abroad. By contrast, Russian state-owned media focuses more about state influence in higher education domestically and abroad. We further consider justifications for higher education policies reported in privately owned news sources like Komsomolskaya Pravda and Vedomosti in Russia to see how these sources differ from state-owned media. Our findings lend important insight into authoritarian politics, the use of state-owned media, and the politics of higher education in non-democracies. NOTE: We would both be presenting, but I'm having trouble indicating this in the online submission system.

Authors

• Jeffrey Nonnemacher, University of Pittsburgh

• Sarah Wilson Sokhey, University of Colorado, Boulder