(Mis)Information in Great Power Competition and Democratic Governance

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The deliberate misuse of information has increasingly become a salient feature of domestic politics and foreign policy in recent years, especially with the advent of misinformation campaigns, “fake news,” and foreign interference operations. As democracies face internal political battles fueled by disinformation, authoritarian regimes are also increasingly turning to information operations as a tool of geopolitical influence. This panel convenes four papers that examine, both theoretically and empirically, how the misuse of information shifts the nature of great power competition in the realm of international security, as well as the functioning of democratic political processes.

The first two papers examine how authoritarian peer competitors, notably Russia and China, can use external propaganda to target democracies and their political processes therein. Goldstein expands on the concept of “influence operations,” which have been undertheorized in international relations and security studies: what the constituent components are, how influence operations differ from other forms of statecraft, their significance for the field, and the path forward for research. Wong develops the notion of “informational statecraft” to analyze how China manipulates the information environments of diaspora populations within democracies, and uses external propaganda in efforts to mobilize diasporas for foreign policy goals and undermine internal democratic cohesion.

The second set of papers examine the consequences of misinformation on domestic governance and democratic representation. Lin looks at how leaders can use disinformation in the form of “whataboutism” narratives to deflect and dismiss the loss of national prestige by pointing out that other peer competitors or rising challengers are suffering from the same problems. Kreps analyzes how advances in machine learning have created synthetic texts which can be used to manufacture inauthentic constituency positions, and how this use of misinformation can undermine political representation and distort democratic governance.

Taken together, the papers provide new theoretical frameworks to understand the role of misinformation in both international security and domestic politics, drawing on multi-method evidence from experiments, text analysis, and case studies. The findings presented in this panel make contributions to understanding information as a new arena of great power contestation and how the misuse of information has created additional stresses on democratic political processes.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Individual Presentations

• Interstate Influence Operations and International Security Studies - Joshua A. Goldstein, University of Oxford

• Informational Statecraft and Diaspora Mobilization - Audrye Wong, University of Southern California

• Manufacturing Status Loss: Smearing Through Foreign Influence Operations - Alex Yu-Ting Lin, University of Notre Dame

• The Effect of Emerging Technologies on Democratic Governance - Sarah E. Kreps

Chair

• Joshua A. Tucker New York University

Discussant

• Jacob Norman Shapiro Princeton University