E-Government Tools, Authoritarian Propaganda, and Regime Support: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

How do e-government tools that enable direct online communications with the executive affect citizens’ support for autocracy? On the one hand, such centralized digital government tools may sway public opinion in favor of a strongman rule at the expense of autocratic institutions; on the other hand, such participation and responsiveness may unintentionally unveil a wide range of issues in the country, undermining trust in the regime. We examine an electronic platform in Turkey, CIMER, that allows citizens to submit petitions and complaints, send messages to the president, and propose policies and programs. We conducted a well-powered online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample (N≈4,600) that estimates the effects of different types of regime propaganda around this e-portal on attitudinal and quasi-behavioral outcomes. The results suggest that propaganda through CIMER improves diffuse support for the regime and generates behavioral compliance, even among opposition voters. However, these positive effects accrue to regime institutions rather than to Erdogan personally as the executive’s personalistic leader. On certain dimensions, the propaganda backfires among the regime’s core support groups with their deteriorated perception of Erdogan’s popularity as a leader. These results have major implications for the expected downstream effects of these types of digital tools on regime stability and legitimacy, and they add to the growing warnings against overly optimistic accounts of the effects of digitalisation on democracy.