Work in Progress

Book Manuscript: Rethinking Propaganda: How Authoritarian Media Cultivate Loyal Audiences (under review)

My book manuscript sheds light on a new model of state media in consolidated autocracies such as Russia. While conventional theories view propaganda as top-down messaging used to persuade, intimidate, or confuse citizens, I argue that propaganda can be a tool of regime maintenance that reinforces the relationship between the autocrat and supporters. This model, which I call service propaganda, borrows tactics from partisan media outlets, combining attractive political narratives that reaffirm pro-regime identities with tailored, engaging news reporting.

In the book, I explain and document the tactics of service propaganda using a corpus of over 100,000 Russian state media stories and an advanced machine learning classifier. I then demonstrate through a series of surveys and experiments that pro-Putin Russians genuinely value state media reporting for its political aspects and the information it offers, while viewing independent media as biased and unreliable. These analyses draw on my recent articles in the Journal of Politics and Political Communication. Further, I show that the Kremlin’s echo chamber remained attractive to Russians during a major political shock—Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. State-run outlets sustained and adjusted their service propaganda model in daily reporting throughout the invasion, helping the Kremlin to ensure public support for the war and acquiescence to it. More generally, my theory of propaganda as a maintenance tool helps explain the longevity and mass legitimacy of autocrats such as Vladimir Putin. The book’s research has also been featured in prominent media outlets, including the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and the Financial Times.

Working Papers

• Puncturing the Propaganda Bubble: An Experiment on Attention to News in Russia (With Georgiy Syunyaev)

  Despite the availability of alternative news sources, citizens in autocratic regimes often remain trapped within state propaganda ecosystems. This study investigates whether and how such information bubbles can be punctured through a six-week panel experiment with 1,176 Russian adults. Participants were randomly assigned to analyze the reporting patterns of Russian state television, either in isolation or alongside more balanced, non-government TV content, over first four weeks. Two weeks after the final round of content analysis, we find that deliberate news processing durably improves media literacy and news awareness without changing the perceptions or consumption of state media. Crucially, such deliberate processing also reduces support for the regime. In addition, participants who compared state propaganda to an alternative source increased both their consumption of and the preference for independent media. These findings suggest that thoughtful engagement with news content can weaken authoritarian information control by fostering skepticism toward propaganda and stimulating interest in alternative sources---even without reducing exposure to state media. Subgroup analyses indicate that these effects are concentrated among citizens who already exhibit some skepticism toward state media.

• What About Whataboutism? (With Hannah Chapman)

  Politicians frequently attempt to deflect criticism and responsibility for wrongdoing by raising irrelevant issues or counter-accusations. This practice, known as whataboutism, was a common Soviet propaganda tactic during the Cold War and has since become a widely used rhetorical strategy in contemporary political debates. But does this propaganda strategy influence political attitudes and, if so, how? This paper presents a research design to test the impact of whataboutism by Russian authorities on political attitudes using original survey experiments of nationally representative populations in Russia. We investigate how reminders by Russian authorities of foreign countries’ record on salient policy issues influence citizens' evaluation of both countries' record on the same issue. We hypothesize that such reminders will depress Russians’ evaluations of the situation not only in the target country but in Russia as well, increasing overall cynicism about their own country’s politics.

• Public Opinion on Social Media Moderation: Evidence From Four Countries (With Yiming Wang, Mingcong Pan, and Yoshiko Herrera)

  Political polarization is a pressing problem around the world and social media have come under scrutiny for their possible role in facilitating it. In democracies, some companies or governments restrict online expression or block access to certain platforms. In autocracies, digital restrictions are used widely to stem oppositional activity, often under the pretense of fighting extremism. Via a series of conjoint experiments in the U.S., China, Germany, and Brazil, we examine support for social media moderation and partisan disagreements about it. We offer important corrections to the existing studies of public opinion on social media: there is a broad cross-country consensus about restricting harmful online speech, and partisan disagreements about content moderation are weaker than some previous research suggests.

• Trust Building Across Identity Groups: An Experiment in Kazakhstan (With Yoshiko Herrera, Andrew Kydd, and Evgeniia Mitrokhina)

  Mistrust is a common cause of conflict between individuals belonging to different identity groups. When can such mistrust be overcome? We study this question using an experiment based on a trust game between members of different social identity groups. In particular, we study the effect of hearing about positive interactions across group lines on the willingness of individuals to take a chance on cooperating with outgroup members. We field the experiment in Kazakhstan, focusing on relations between Kazakhs and Russians.

• Combating Information Avoidance in Wartime Russia: A Multidisciplinary Field Experiment (With Julia A. Minson, Aaron Erlich, Jordan Gans-Morse, Christopher Higgins, and others)

  We report the results of two large-scale field experiments examining the effectiveness of email-based communication in the context of Russian information manipulation following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We contacted academics across the social sciences and asked them to produce messages to persuade Russian residents to watch a truthful video about the invasion. In partnership with the non-profit Mail2Ru, we randomly assigned eleven expert messages and two control treatments to approximately 260,000 email addresses. Only one message led to significantly greater engagement with the video relative to the control treatments, with 9 messages performing in line with the controls and one message underperforming them. We then successfully replicated the effectiveness of our top-performing intervention in a second experiment. Our work highlights the challenges associated with effective communication in the face of disinformation and government surveillance and point to the urgent need for experimental research in this area.