Why It Matters What Autocrats Say: Assessing Competing Theories of Propaganda

Constantine Boussalis, Alexander Dukalskis and Johannes Gerschewski

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2022, vol. 70, issue 3, 241-252

Abstract: This article investigates two accounts of political propaganda in autocratic regimes. One argues that propaganda’s content does not matter substantively and that propaganda is mostly a signal of the regime’s overwhelming power over citizens. A second argues that propaganda is substantively meaningful: autocrats may communicate strategically either by attracting attention through highlighting the regime’s strengths or by distracting attention away from the regime’s malperformance. Using nearly 135,000 North Korean state-generated news articles between 1997 and 2018 we show that North Korea systematically adjusted its communication strategies following the leadership transfer from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un.

Keywords: Authoritarianism; Autocracy; North Korea; Text-as-data; Propaganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:300111

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