Marketing Authoritarian Practices at Home and Abroad

Authoritarian regimes thrive around the world. As they have resisted democratization (Maerz et al., 2020), they have become more assertive and started to craft their image as a countermodel to liberal states and to advance authoritarian-friendly international norms. Existing literature on autocracies has focused on institutional features, domestic legitimation strategies, and repressive policies. While authoritarian governments do employ more coercion than democracies, they are not indifferent towards how they are perceived by various audiences. Autocrats are concerned about their image, both domestically and abroad. This workshop seeks to disentangle the different ways in which autocracies construe and protect their images and how they communicate to influence public opinion on the global and local levels. This topic cuts across comparative politics, international relations, and political communication research and illuminates the puzzle of authoritarian resilience. Understanding the methods and effects of authoritarian image crafting has relevance for understanding the global authoritarian advance and where it might be heading. Domestically, state actors use a multitude of means, such as media, movies, TV shows, and other kinds of rhetorical and propaganda instruments to convey a certain image of the state. These instruments of “positive” framing are buttressed by repressive means such as censorship and gag orders of online and offline media. Strict legislation, judicial enforcement, and state media serve as the legal and institutional basis for tightly controlling narratives and framing public opinion. Such communication efforts are especially important during phases of societal unrest and political contestation, as when framing attempts are used to justify repressive actions in an effort to avoid backlash effects (Josua 2021). Internationally, autocracies engage in various initiatives to bolster their image abroad, like investing in foreign-facing media and public diplomacy programs. They use PR firms and set up institutions to invest in liberal democracies, creating reciprocal dependencies and mutual interests that are instrumental in contributing to authoritarian resilience. Next to using positive tactics of persuasion, autocratic incumbents also seek to control the narratives about them on a transnational level by using repression vis-à-vis journalists reporting on the country and dissidents living abroad (Dukalskis 2021). These tactics help protect the narrative from criticism so that the state can propagate its own messages. This workshop will help overcome limitations in our current understanding of the interplay between domestic and international image. First, the literature on ideas, narratives, and framing in domestic and international propaganda in domestic authoritarianism and international authoritarianism is often only weakly linked (notable exceptions include Holbig 2011; Hoffmann 2015; del Sordi and Dalmasso 2018). The workshop aims to pierce the barrier between comparative politics and international relations perspectives on authoritarian image management. Second, much existing literature is case- or region-specific. This workshop will drive toward cross-national and cross-regional comparisons by getting papers to engage with one another. Third, a persistent difficulty is measuring “success” of these efforts. The workshop will drive papers toward systematically adducing evidence to understand the success/failure of authoritarian image efforts.