What Levers of Authoritarian Power Influence Public Attitudes about Democracy?

• In Event: Global Disinformation & Power

Abstract

Global freedom is facing its greatest crisis since the end of the Cold War. Some estimates suggest that in 2022, democratic backsliding and autocratization have erased all the hard-earned democratic gains from the previous thirty-five years. Scholars attribute this decline in global democracy to a broad range of domestic and international variables, including factors such as foreign direct investment in infrastructure projects, paramilitary support activities, and covert influence operations on social media (Deibert, 2019; Diamond 2019; Schmitt 2019). Here, debates about authoritarian levers of influence often focus on whether these tools impact democratic backsliding or authoritarian resilience (Dreher et al 2021; Dukalskis 2021; Ramani 2023; Yakouchyk, 2019). Thus, the focus of many scholarly discussions about democratic backsliding focuses on how these variables might change regimes. We extend this important corpus of scholarship by examining how different levers of authoritarian influence change individual attitudes about democracy.

Authoritarian influence activities have dramatically increased in recent years, with Russia and China leveraging a range of tools to shape broader authoritarian agendas. In particular, new capacities for information manipulation have led to important questions about the impact of these campaigns on democratic decline, including their ability to foster political polarization, lower the transaction costs of organizing offline violence, and mainstreaming counter-hegemonic narratives (Deibert, 2019; Diamond, 2019; Hunter, 2023; Schmitt 2018). Premised on the theory that institutions change slower than individual attitudes, our project empirically investigates how authoritarian influence operations on social media impact individual satisfaction with democracy, and whether information operations are potent tools for influencing individual attitudes about democracy.

To empirically answer these questions, we draw on new datasets covering a broad range of influence strategies, and merged public opinion data from regional surveys to systematically analyze how foreign influence operations impact democratic attitudes cross-nationally. By employing a multi-level Ordinary Least Squares regression with variables at the country level, we focus on statistically testing two key hypotheses across 56 countries on the African continent: First, our information contamination hypothesis posits that foreign influence operations will reduce satisfaction with and positive attitudes towards democracy. Second, our autocratic activation hypothesis focuses on the target government’s autocratic capacity and policy context, rather than the country’s information environment. Here, predict that the “domestic interference” variable will adversely impact democratic attitudes, and control for potentially confounding factors such as level of development, social media usage, and trade volume dyads to control for economic linkages.

Our research will inform both theories of democratization and democratic backsliding, and the conditions under which authoritarian influence operations are effective at altering individual attitudes and perceptions about democracy. By focusing on individual beliefs, rather than regimes, our research will provide another test of autocracy promotion, complementing much of the previous literature’s regime-level analysis. Furthermore, we expect to offer new evidence about the impact influence operations can have on democracy, and in countries understudied and theorized in the disinformation literature.

References
Deibert, Ronald. 2019. "The Road to Digital Unfreedom: Three Painful Truths about Social Media." Journal of Democracy 30 (1): 25-39

Dreher, Axel, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks, Austin Strange, and Michael J Tierney. 2021. "Aid, China, and growth: Evidence from a new global development finance dataset." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13 (2): 135-174.

Diamond, Larry. 2019. “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: The Threat of Postmodern Totalitarianism” Journal of Democracy 30(1): 20-24.

Dukalskis, Alexander. 2017. The authoritarian public sphere : legitimation and autocratic power in North Korea, Burma, and China. Routledge studies on comparative Asian politics. London ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Ramani, Samuel. 2023. Russia in Africa: Resurgent Great Power Or Bellicose Pretender? New York: Oxford University Press.

Schmitt, Olivier. 2018. "When are strategic narratives effective? The shaping of political discourse through the interaction between political myths and strategic narratives." Contemporary Security Policy 39 (4): 487-511.

Yakouchyk, Katsiaryna. 2019. "Beyond Autocracy Promotion: A Review." Political studies review 17 (2): 147-160. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918774976.

Authors

• Samantha Bradshaw, American University

• Carl LeVan, American University