Why It Matters What Autocrats Say: Assessing Competing Theories of Propaganda

ABSTRACT

This article investigates two accounts of political propaganda in autocratic regimes. One argues that propaganda’s content does not matter substantively and that propaganda is mostly a signal of the regime’s overwhelming power over citizens. A second argues that propaganda is substantively meaningful: autocrats may communicate strategically either by attracting attention through highlighting the regime’s strengths or by distracting attention away from the regime’s malperformance. Using nearly 135,000 North Korean state-generated news articles between 1997 and 2018 we show that North Korea systematically adjusted its communication strategies following the leadership transfer from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.2012199

Notes

1. The distinction between these two approaches should not be seen as absolute. We treat them as ideal-typical approaches for the sake of analytic clarity.

2. The May 2018 update does not include articles from Rodong Sinmun. The series for this news outlet covers the time period January 15, 2015, to March 6, 2017. Further, the article count of the total corpus does not include 16,034 articles that are in Spanish. With respect to replicability, the kcna.co.jp servers, which are geo-blocked in many Western countries, were accessed through a Japanese IP address via VPN.

3. The articles are officially translated English-language versions, which is consistent with previous scholarship using North Korean text as data (e.g. Rich 2014a, 2012b; Whang, Lammbrau, and Joo 2017). Nevertheless, some might be concerned about differences. Therefore, as a robustness check, we asked an independent coder (a native Korean speaker with knowledge of North Korean politics) to assess the quantity and content of the English and Korean language outputs of KCNA material for 25 randomly selected days in our sample (n = 412 articles). While differences in tone and intensity were sometimes apparent, the content and quantity were very similar. On a 5-point scale, with 5 being “fundamentally the same in tone, content, and meaning” and 1 being “major differences in tone, content, and meaning,” the average score across the 25 days was 4.46 (SD = 0.93).

4. Note that a proximate dynamic topic modeling approach using Non-negative Matrix Factorization has been developed by Greene and Cross (2017).

5. Specifically, we (1) lowercase all tokens; (2) remove stop words (function words listed in the Python NLTK English corpus), punctuation, and numbers; and (3) drop tokens that show up only once or contain less than 2 characters.

6. The Python code used to estimate the model by the wrapper can be found at https://github.com/blei-lab/dtm.

7. A perennial issue that arises when implementing unsupervised topic models is that the number of topics k is set by the researcher a priori. Given that we have weak theoretical prior information on the number of themes contained in the corpus, we estimated a number of topic model solutions at various levels of k. Based on our qualitative evaluation of topic coherence and exclusivity, we chose k = 85.

8. Please note that we differ here in our conceptualization from King, Pan, and Roberts (2017). They argue for the Chinese case that pro-regime “cheerleading” by online commentators is a form of “distraction” as these commentators do not engage in serious arguments with skeptics of the Communist Party. In that sense, they are distracting from the argument at hand, but not distracting from the achievements of the Chinese Communist Party. We use the concept of attraction and distraction in a different way, such that the regime “cheerleading” for achievements is actually a strategy of attraction. We argue that attracting attention to the regime via cheerleading state propaganda is achieved by referring to positive aspects, performances, and achievements of the regime. In contrast, we use distraction of attention when the regime tries, for example, to shift blame to external actors. The propensity for authoritarian states to distract from failures has also been studied in electoral authoritarian regimes (see Aytaç 2021).

9. More concretely, we argue that the super-topics of “domestic development,” “ideology/revolutionary legacy,” “reunification,” and rally-around-the-flag-messages and national solidarity appeals via topics of “external threat,” “foreign affairs,” and the “nuclear issue” attract attention to the ruling regime because they provide an image of a strong and active state. In contrast, we argue that distracting attention from its performance appears when the regime criticizes “South Korean Politics,” “Japanese Politics,” “International Politics,” and makes reference to only “Ceremonial Diplomacy.”

10. We also replicated the regression analyses discussed above using an alternative Distraction super-topic dependent variable which also includes the Natural Disaster topic. The results of the model estimation are very similar to those reported in Table B.1 in the Online Appendix, where we continue to observe a statistically significant decrease in Distraction communication (β2 = −0.04928, p < 0.05) following the formal succession of Kim Jong Un.

11. We also perform a second set of statistical tests which include two succession treatment periods: (1) the decision by Kim Jong Il to appoint Kim Jong Un as his successor (June 2, 2009) and (2) the actual succession of Kim Jong Un (December 19, 2011). These models produce very similar effects of the succession on North Korean propaganda communication.

12. We estimate the interrupted time-series models using the user-written itsa command in Stata (Linden 2015).

13. “Juche” is the official state ideology that goes back to state founder Kim Il Sung. It is an ultranationalist ideology with communist borrowings that particularly emphasizes self-reliance. “Songun” is the succeeding ideology of Kim Jong Il that emphasizes the dominant role of the military.