Propaganda and Disinformation in Competitive Autocracies: The Case of Turkey

How and why do political elites use propaganda in a competitive autocratic setting and how do citizens respond to it? This research aims to understand these questions by borrowing from propaganda, disinformation, legitimacy, and authoritarianism literature. Using Turkey as my country case, I draw on legitimacy literature to propose that the regime and the opposition uses specific legitimating propaganda and disinformation strategies. For the first part of my question, drawing on text analysis methods used on parliamentary speeches and news sources, I attempt to find if the increasing autocratization has led to different propaganda strategies through time by political elites. Subsequently, I examine if times of crisis and election period leads to specific propaganda strategies and increased disinformation by different actors. For the second part of my research, I will conduct a survey experiment to examine how citizens respond to different propaganda strategies and which strategies are more successful in acquiring the desired outcome by the propagandists.