How the Kremlin Maintains Mass Support through Belief Affirmation

• In Event: Propaganda, Censorship, and Self-Censorship in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

Scholars of autocracies have long debated how propaganda works. Traditionally, propaganda was viewed as ideological indoctrination, a form of brainwashing by repetition, but more recent scholarship suggests that it can be used in more intricate ways—to intimidate, confuse, distract citizens, or, on the contrary, to convey the regime’s effectiveness via arguments and rationalizations. This paper offers a different perspective: In autocracies with substantial public support, such as Russia, rulers do not need to win over or intimidate large groups of citizens; rather, their primary need is to maintain the support and trust of those already on their side and to keep this public invested in the regime. Propaganda can solve this problem via identity-congruent reporting that invokes positive feelings and trust in the state’s narratives among existing regime supporters, a model of media coverage that I call “affirmation propaganda.” Such propaganda reinforces beliefs that are desirable for the regime and simultaneously satisfies public demand for familiar political narratives, helping regime supporters to maintain their identity and justify their beliefs. Affirmation propaganda also undermines the credibility of alternative information sources by making them appear biased and hostile to pro-regime citizens, and it gives regime supporters counterarguments that they can use against alternative, critical information.
In this paper, I derive several important theoretical predictions about the usage of affirmation propaganda and test them using quantitative and qualitative analyses of Russian state media content, namely, prime-time state television news broadcasts from 2000–2023. I define several important subtypes of affirmation propaganda, such as glorifying the nation and its past, highlighting injustices against the nation, and portraying the country’s opponents as weak and troubled, and I trace the presence of these propaganda subtypes throughout Putin’s rule. I leverage the recent developments in topic modeling, including BERTopic, a text clustering algorithm that builds on multilingual word embeddings to develop accurate representations of latent topics in text corpora. Via BERTopic, I establish the intensity of affirmation propaganda subtopics across different periods of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia.
In addition, I provide qualitative analyses of typical prime-time Russian propaganda broadcasts, demonstrating how belief-affirming reporting helps propagandists structure their messages around topics and emotions relevant to pro-Putin citizens, and how the Kremlin’s media use such propaganda tactics to improve the effectiveness of their persuasion efforts.

Author

• Anton Shirikov, University of Kansas