Impact of Authoritarian Illiberal Narratives on Democracy: The Case of Japan

• In Event: Propaganda, Persuasion, and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that narrative persuasion, which embeds persuasive intentions within a story, often possesses a higher degree of effectiveness compared to persuasion based solely on arguments and logic, which frequently encounters failures. Narrative persuasion achieves its persuasive power by suppressing counter-arguments, eliciting emotional responses towards the characters within the story, and thus effectively influencing its audience. On the other hand, in conflicts such as the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict, both parties involved actively disseminate narratives with the aim of shaping international public opinion in their favor. This phenomenon extends beyond armed conflicts and is relevant to propaganda and public diplomacy as well. This study specifically focuses on the illiberal narratives employed by authoritarian states and examines to what extent these narratives can persuade citizens in democratic nations, with a particular emphasis on comparing narrative and non-narrative formats. To achieve this, we will present both the claims made by the Chinese government regarding the re-education camps in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and the positions of Western democratic nations in both straight news format and narrative format, estimating the differences in persuasive effectiveness.

The experiment was conducted online, targeting Japanese nationals aged 18 to 79, both male and female, recruited through quota sampling based on gender, age, and residential region from Lucid. The sample size was predetermined at 2,400 through power analysis, and the hypotheses were preregistered. After responding to covariates, the experimental participants were randomly assigned to one of five conditions: the control condition, mainstream straight news condition, pro-China straight news condition, mainstream narrative condition, or pro-China narrative condition.

The mainstream narrative asserts that the re-education camps in Xinjiang are part of the suppression of Uighur Muslims and involve various human rights abuses. This perspective is widely accepted in Western democratic nations. On the other hand, the pro-China narrative contends that the facilities in Xinjiang are vocational training centers, aimed at addressing issues such as poverty and countering Islamic extremist terrorism. According to this viewpoint, after the operation of these facilities, extremist terrorism has been eradicated, and societal stability has been restored. This perspective aligns consistently with the stance of the Chinese government. The control condition presents a neutral background explanation solely regarding the issues in Xinjiang. In the straight news conditions, a bias is introduced in favor of the respective positions of Western nations and China, while maintaining the format of traditional hard news reporting. In the narrative conditions, a story featuring a 17-year-old Uighur girl is presented. Specifically, in the mainstream condition, a narrative is implied in which the girl's beloved father is tortured and killed in a re-education camp, and the girl seeks a society where she can live freely. In the pro-China condition, the same girl experiences her father's death similarly, but in this case, her father is killed in an Islamic extremist terrorism incident. The girl believes that if vocational training centers had been established earlier, her father would have been spared, highlighting her belief in the necessity of these facilities for societal stability.

The dependent variable in the experiment is the evaluation of the facilities (i.e., "re-education camps" in the mainstream argument and "vocational training centers" in the pro-China argument). The primary focus lies on whether the pro-China narrative can effectively persuade Japanese individuals in a favorable direction for China. The analysis results indicate that, regardless of format, both the mainstream and pro-China narratives exhibit statistically significant persuasive effects in the intended direction. Notably, the pro-China narrative condition demonstrates a particularly substantial effect. Specifically, the effect size of the pro-China narrative condition is approximately twice as large as that of the mainstream narrative condition, leading to a shift in Japanese individuals' attitudes towards the facilities in Xinjiang in a favorable direction. This suggests that illiberal arguments favorable to authoritarian nations can effectively persuade the public in democratic countries when conveyed in narrative form.

This particular experiment pertains to a specific topic, namely, facilities in Xinjiang, and its external validity is limited. Therefore, we have conducted similar experiments on two different topics: the 2019 Hong Kong protests and the Quran burning protests in Sweden sparked by Turkey's opposition to Sweden's NATO accession. These additional experiments aim to assess the robustness of our findings. We intend to present the results of all three experiments at the APSA conference.

Authors

• Tetsuro Kobayashi, Waseda University

• Yuan Zhou, Kobe University

• Lungta Seki, Kobe Univeristy

• Asako Miura, Osaka University