Justifying power: when autocracies talk about themselves and their opponents

ABSTRACT

It is commonly understood that authoritarian regimes attempt to legitimize their rule and de-legitimize opponents. What is less clear is the intensity with which they do so, whether (de-)legitimation varies by institutional structure, and whether and how this intensity varies in times of crisis. To address these questions, this article focuses on the types of messages that autocracies disseminate, how they vary across autocratic regime types, and how they change when confronted with system-challenging movements. The article tests expectations using quantitative events data on government statements, movements and state repression. It also examines a case of a single-party regime faced with a widespread protest movement, namely China in 1989, to investigate whether the quantitative findings manifest themselves in the dynamics of a particular episode. The article finds evidence that autocratic regimes regularly disseminate messages to legitimize their rule and de-legitimize opponents and that single-party regimes generally engage in more (de-)legitimizing rhetoric than other autocratic regime types both during ordinary times and times of regime crisis. In general, regimes scale up their (de-)legitimation efforts when they face a major system-challenging movement as well as when they choose to repress such movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Autocracy
• legitimation
• authoritarianism
• repression
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eva Wegner and Maria Josua for helpful comments on earlier drafts, as well as colleagues at the 2017 International Studies Association conference and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alexander Dukalskis (Ph.D. 2013, University of Notre Dame) is an assistant professor at University College Dublin. His research and teaching focuses on authoritarianism, human rights, and Asian politics. His research has been published in several academic journals, including Journal of Peace Research, Democratization, Review of International Studies, and Government & Opposition. His book The Authoritarian Public Sphere was published in 2017.

Christopher Patane (Ph.D. 2016, University of Missouri) is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. His research and teaching focuses on human rights, government propaganda, and social movements. His research has been published in the Journal of Development Studies and PS: Political Science & Politics.

ORCID

Alexander Dukalskis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4477-7837

Christopher Patane http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2338-9675

Notes

1. This article focuses on rhetorical legitimation in the form of specific messages or symbols. It does not conceptualize performance or policy as legitimation, so if an autocracy presided over economic growth, this would not be an instance of legitimation as such. However, if the government highlighted its positive record in public statements, then this would be an example of legitimation.

2. In our data from 1995 to 2006, there are a minimum of 44 publishers in our yearly data files, with a maximum of 188. A tabulation of all publishers by year is available on request.

3. Table A4 in the appendix contains a robustness test using data from the Authoritarian Regime Dataset (Wahman et al., 2013).

4. Table A5 presents results showing patterns of (de)legitimation in autocracies where non-authoritarian states are used as the reference category.

5. In our sample, we have 345 single-party, 47 military, 88 monarchy, and 298 personalist country-years.

6. Tables A6 and A7 present negative binomial estimations of the same models presented in Tables 1 and 2 with dummy variable country fixed effects following Allison and Waterman (2002). Additionally, models using yearly dummies to control for temporal dependence were tested, but yielded results identical to the lagged dependent variable models presented here.

7. Marginal effects plots showing the substantive effect of these results are contained in Figures A1–A6.

8. As shown in the appendix (Table A4), results for monarchies and military regimes are also quite sensitive to alternative specifications.