Message or Messenger? Source and Labeling Effects in Authoritarian Response to Protest

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231168361
• Author: Daniel Arnon,Pearce Edwards,Handi Li
• Date: 01 October 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(12) 1891–1923

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231168361

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Message or Messenger?

Source and Labeling

Effects in Authoritarian

Response to Protest

Daniel Arnon

1

, Pearce Edwards

2

, and Handi Li

3,4

Abstract

Authoritarian regimes in the 21st century have increasingly turned to using

information control rather than kinetic force to respond to threats to their

rule. This paper studies an often overlooked type of information control:

strategic labeling and public statements by regime sources in response to

protests. Labeling protesters as violent criminals may increase support for

repression by signaling that protests are illegitimate and deviant. Regime

sources, compared to more independent sources, could increase support for

repression even more when paired with such an accusatory label. Accom-

modative labels should have opposing effects—decreasing support for re-

pression. The argument is tested with a survey experiment in China which

labels environmental protests. Accusatory labels increase support for re-

pression of protests. Regime sources, meanwhile, have no advantage over

non-governmental sources in shifting opinion. The f‌indings suggest that

negative labels de-legitimize protesters and legitimize repression while the

sources matter less in this contentious authoritarian context.

1

University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

2

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

3

Peking University, Beijing, China

4

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Pearce Edwards, Louisiana State University, 240 Stubbs Hall Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.

Email: pedwards1@lsu.edu

Keywords

information control, China, protest, propaganda, repression

Introduction

How do authoritarian regimes respond to the threat of mass protests? In the

21st century, regimes rely less on kinetic force such as repression (Davenport,

2007) and increasingly on controlling information f‌lows and shaping citizens’

beliefs about events (Guriev and Treisman 2019). Among the strategies of

information control, particularly for mass threats, are censorship and dis-

traction in which the regime attempts to prevent the spread of information

about protests which could undermine the regime’s authority (King et al.,

2017;Roberts, 2018). Yet the regime also communicates information about

contentious actions directly to its citizens through state media outlets and

off‌icial statements (Baum & Zhukov, 2015;Peisakhin & Rozenas, 2018;

Rozenas & Stukal, 2019). Despite the ubiquity of regimes’information-based

responses to protest, we know little about their effects on public opinion.

Existing research suggests that attributes of protests affect public opinion

(Dahlum, Pinckney and Wig 2022;Hou & Quek, 2019;Manekin & Mitts,

2020;Wasow, 2020), but regimes also present additional information in the

form of “editorializing”their responses to protest events which could shape

opinion (Carter & Carter, 2021).

In this paper, we argue that protest events in authoritarian regimes receive

labels which describe the perceived legitimacy of their participants. Labels of

protests may be accusatory or accommodative, either def‌ining the events as

illegitimate and their participants as criminals or acknowledging protesters’

underlying grievances (Baum & Zhukov, 2015;Cohen, 2011). Accusatory

labels are expected to increase citizens’support for repression of protest by

pitting them as deviants against the ordering inf‌luence of security forces.

Accommodative labels, meanwhile, decrease support for repression. Given

that regimes often deploy these labels in response to protest events, it could be

the case that the regime complements and enhances labels’effects when

serving as the source for a statement. Dictatorships’statements have several

known effects: inducing compliance (Huang 2015a,2015b;Trinh & Truong,

2020), favorably shifting policy positions (Hou & Quek, 2019;Peisakhin &

Rozenas, 2018), and sending signals of strength or trustworthiness (Frye &

Borisova, 2019) that make citizens more likely to support or oppose re-

pression depending on whether the regime accuses or accommodates pro-

testers, respectively.

We test the empirical implications of the argument with a survey exper-

iment in China, an authoritarian regime in which control of information is a

central strategy in managing public opinion (Huang 2015a,2015b,2018,

1892 Comparative Political Studies 56(12)

King et al., 2017;Roberts, 2018). It is also a regime which uses a variety of

labels—and in which a variety of sources comment—in response to domestic

protest events. We focus on different informational responses to

environmental protests, events which have become a salient issue drawing

signif‌icant media and scholarly interest over the past two decades.

1

In the

experiment, respondents were randomly presented with vignettes which

employed different labels—accusatory, accommodative, and a baseline

neutral condition—about an environmental protest which originated from

either a government source or an non-government scholar source. We evaluate

respondents’post-treatment perceptions, attitudes, and stated behavioral

intentions with respect to environmental protests.

Our experimental results reveal a stark contrast between the effects of

labels and the effects of sources. On one hand, accusatory labels have

substantively large effects on the support for repression of protests and de-

creased willingness to support protests. These effects are consistent across

different estimation strategies. On the other hand, the regime has no advantage

over a non-government scholar in shifting citizens’attitudes in the direction

intended by the label’s content: regardless of whether the label is accusatory or

accommodative, the effects of a state media statement about the event are

indistinguishable from the effects of a scholar’s statement across our key

outcome measures. Ultimately, our f‌indings indicate that the message, rather

than the messenger, shapes attitudes when authoritarian regimes issue in-

formational responses to protests.

Following the results of our main hypothesis tests, we probe the mech-

anism through which labels affect citizens’response to protest and repression

and consider alternative explanations. We show that accusatory labels deter

respondents’sympathy with protests not by shifting attention away from the

underlying issue motivating the protest, but rather by changing their per-

ceptions of the protesters and their intended behavior. In particular, re-

spondents do not shift attitudes toward local off‌icials or the underlying policy

stakes of the protest even when the central government is the source of the

label. We also examine our null f‌inding for source effects, inferring that both

government and scholarly sources persuade respondents by showing that

perceptions of source credibility and indicators of intimidation do not vary

between the government and non-government scholar sources. Our results

suggest that, as a common yet rarely studied response to protests in au-

thoritarian regimes, accusatory protest labels de-legitimize protesters and

legitimize repression. It also shows that manipulating the views about an

existing protest may also prevent future protest. Moreover, while literature on

propaganda focuses on effects of messages from state media (Adena et al.,

2015;Pan et al., 2021;Peisakhin & Rozenas, 2018;Yanagizawa-Drott, 2014),

we compare the content of the message between governmental and

Arnon et al. 1893