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 Daily
Abstract
It is well understood that autocrats have used propaganda to portray the incumbent regime in a positive light, but do they use it to diminish the appeal of alternative systems of government? To address this question, I employ word embeddings to measure propaganda in a large corpus of Chinese-language news and assess whether Chinese state media portray democratic and non-democratic countries differently using three-way fixed-effects regression. 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 outlets. These findings provide new insights into the behavior of Chinese state media and have important implications for understanding authoritarian resilience and the diffusion of democracy.
Patrick J. Chester
Assistant Professor
Patrick Chester is an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science at Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Politics from New York University’s Politics Department.