Indoctrination, Citizen Support and Political Regimes (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Building Autocracy: New Theoretical Insights and Empirical Findings

Abstract

Regime survival depends in part on the support by ordinary citizens, which constitute the largest societal group. Without such intrinsic support and compliance, regimes have to rely on more costly strategies such as repression or goods provision. However, we know very little about how regimes create citizen support and what kind of tools they use to achieve this goal. This paper fills this gap by providing a new conceptual framework, focusing on indoctrination as a political tool to shape public support for the regime. The paper will synthesize a large historical literature from several disciplines – comparative politics, political theory, economics, history, and education – on indoctrination into a single framework. The main purpose of indoctrination is to create the national community and citizen support for the regime, which we assume reduces the cost of ruling. We expect three key components of authoritarian indoctrination – education, political communication, and mass mobilisation – to be at the heart of impacting the formation of citizens’ authoritarian support. We argue that the state provision of education received early in life (during formative years) influences individuals’ diffuse regime support. Hence, education can be seen as an investment strategy to citizen support. Through publicly controlled information (e.g. censorship and propaganda), regimes can further create more specific support, which is important for regime legitimization. Lastly, we argue that mass mobilisation creates a feedback loop that affects attitudes through habitualization and repeated practice. Based on the theory, the paper will outline a novel empirical strategy of measuring indoctrination and its sub-components, which will be achieved using expert coding by adapting the V-Dem methodology. We will present first explorative results using Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil, Syria, Thailand, Spain, Turkey and Tanzania as case studies.

Authors

• Anja Neundorf, University of Glasgow

• Eugenia Nazrullaeva, Higher School of Economics

• K Northmore-Ball

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London