Causing and Communicating Bad News: How Autocrats Legitimize Repression

Autocracies often encounter crises that have the potential to elicit popular dissatisfaction and threaten regime survival. In order to alleviate negative repercussions, autocrats communicate with their citizens, with repertoires ranging from denying, downplaying or lying to justifying state measures (Edel 2019). This paper conceptualizes how autocratic incumbents communicate political repression against protests, activists, or the population more broadly. While denial seems to be straightforward for autocracies with tight control of the media, it is not suitable for dealing with highly visible events that citizens experience themselves or know of. In these and other instances, autocrats attempt to legitimize repressive measures vis-à-vis the population and/or external actors. This paper critically discusses findings from research on repression, political communication, and authoritarian legitimation, bringing them together in an innovative framework conceptualizing the legitimation of repression. This adds a new twist to Comparative Authoritarianism research, where legitimation and repression are mostly treated as separate strategies (Gerschewski 2013). Acknowledging that the two are interlinked and affect each other adds an important piece in the puzzle of authoritarian survival illuminating the “dark side” of legitimation. In framing the targets of repression in a certain way, autocrats seek to attain the approval of observers and deter potential dissidents (Edel and Josua 2018). Autocracies differ in their degree of openness or opacity, influencing the readiness of state officials to conceal or admit to repressive acts. Various state actors in autocracies use different justifications with respect to the involved audiences, the identity of targets of repression, and the forms of repression that were used. The patterns of political communication that emerge in empirical analyses may offer a blueprint for explaining state discourse in other situations of crises, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic.