Framing Democracy: Deciphering China's Anti-Democratic Propaganda using Word Embeddings
In reference to the COVID-19 Pandemic, this graphic from China’s state media is a clear example of anti-democratic propaganda. It describes the American response as overwhelmingly arrogant while in contrast China responded quickly to inform its people of the virus’s threat. Source: People’s DailyAbstract
Autocrats have long used propaganda to maintain their grip on power, but what happens when they are forced to confront the appeal of alternative regimes? I employ word embeddings to measure whether there is a significant difference in how Chinese state media portrays democratic and non-democratic countries using three-way fixed effects regression analysis. My results show that the more democratic a country is, the more China’s state media portrays its politics as chaotic and corrupt relative to two baseline news publications. This study offers novel insights into the behavior of Chinese state media, with significant implications for to our understanding of autocratic stability and the spread of democracy.
Patrick J. Chester
Postdoctoral researcher
Patrick Chester is a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at UC, San Diego who received his PhD from New York University’s Politics Department.