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When and how does political persuasion employed by authoritarian regimes influence the attitudes and behavior of domestic and foreign audiences? Focusing on China, this dissertation comprises three essays in which the effectiveness of political persuasion in public education and mass media was examined. The overarching finding is that the Chinese regime's persuasive efforts are more effective among citizens who have familial connections to state patronage, who are predisposed to be regime-friendly, and who hold relatively weak political positions. By contrast, China-related persuasion often has a limited effect, sometimes even backfiring, for people who lack these background characteristics. A wide range of methodological approaches was adopted in this dissertation, including randomized controlled trials, natural experiments, survey research, and qualitative interviews. The findings reveal the potential and limits of the regime's propaganda and indoctrination, showing how persuasion works and among which segment of the population it works best. Despite devoting considerable resources to projecting influence both domestically and abroad, the Chinese government appears to win the hearts and minds of targets only under certain conditions.

The effect of religious media is a controversial topic of debates among religious media practitioners, theologians, and ministers in religious communities because they differently understood the roles of religious media on audience members' religious practice. Based on the uses and gratification perspective, this dissertation investigated how audience members' motivation to deepen their faith via religious media affects their religious knowledge, religious attitude, and religious behavioral intention. This study examined (a) how religious media affect religious audience members, (b) how the effect differs in a various demographic and religious audience groups, such as education, income, the duration of audience members' religious experience, their activeness in practicing their faith, and their motivation to deepen their faith, and (c) how the employment of the central vs. peripheral information processing strategies influences the outcomes of religious media use. This study proposed that the relationship between the faith motivation and the outcomes of religious drama exposure will be mediated by the employment of the information processing strategy in the elaboration likelihood model (ELM).A three-phase pre-test and post-test field experiment was conducted to trace the changes in participants' religious knowledge, religious attitudes, and religious behavioral intention. Participants watched one hour-long manipulated rational or emotional religious drama in their parishes. In data analysis, participants were divided into novice Catholics and experienced Catholics, passive Catholics and active Catholics, and Catholics with low faith motivation and those with high faith motivation to test the premises of the uses and gratification and the ELM.The results show that religious drama is an effective format in religious programming in audience members' religious knowledge increase, their religious attitude reinforcement, and their religious behavioral intention changes. Some demographic variables, such as education and household income, affect the outcome variables. The three faith related variables, (a) the duration of practicing faith, (b) audience members' activeness in practicing faith, and (c) their motivation to deepen their faith via religious media, interact with one another and directly affect audience members' religious knowledge, attitude, and behavioral intention. Therefore, the moderating model explains the effects of religious drama exposure better than the mediating model. Theoretical and practical implication of this research is discussed.

Politics and the economy are inextricably linked. This study argues that the economy has been an under-developed contextual variable capable of coordinating the process and consequences of political communication. An economic theory of political communication effects is proposed to capture the dynamic ecology of citizens’ political involvement. In particular, economic conditions are theorized to impact voters’ news media use and political learning through a series of mechanisms.The study analyzed fifty years of ANES (American National Election Studies) data through using multilevel modeling techniques. Results show that a) both the “bad news-prone” media and economically-rational voters were reactive to serious economic declines; b) based on subjective value judgments, political information from the news media was perceived to carry different levels of gratifications and utilities under different economic conditions; and c) voters with different levels of learning motivation exhibited varying degrees of learning effects through seeking and absorbing campaign information from the news media. The contribution of this study lies in its focus on one societal level variable, the economy to examine political communication effects. Given that informed participation strikes at the very heart of representative democracy, it is important to understand the underlying processes and mechanisms of political learning from both micro and macro perspectives. The current study provides solid evidence to support the arguments from existing literature on the role of motivation, media use, and information environment in learning about politics. In addition, a causal flow is established from the presence of an economic crisis, to learning motivation, to news exposure, and finally to knowledge acquisition.It is maintained that the study of political communication can benefit from considering macro economic variables, which can bring more explanatory power to models of political communication effects, test the degree of economic rationality of the electorate in response to variegated social settings, and build a political communication effects theory that addresses both micro- and macro- factors.