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Many autocrats govern with an in-group, whose support must be secured, and an out-group, which is subject to repression. How do autocrats exploit in-group/out-group dynamics to secure their survival? One strategy, we argue, is to broadcast out-group repression to the in-group as a signal of the regime's capacity for violence. Empirically, we focus on China, where the government represses ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Drawing on 1 million articles from six propaganda newspapers, we show that the regime broadcasts out-group repression to urban elites on each anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when 10% of Beijing residents joined anti-regime protests. To understand its effects, we conducted a survey experiment balanced on the national census during the June 2020 Tiananmen anniversary. Using a list experiment to mitigate preference falsification, we show that CCP propaganda about Uyghurs during the Tiananmen anniversary discourages protests among politically engaged urban elites because they fear repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is limited evidence that reliance on foreign aid from Western donors compels repressive governments to embrace democratic reforms and respect citizens' rights. However, donors have another, potentially more powerful source of financial leverage: debt relief. This paper exploits two features of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative, launched by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1996, to probe whether Western leverage has constrained repression across Africa. First, the Bretton Woods institutions initiated debt relief negotiations with virtually all African governments. Second, many recipients were in power long before HIPC negotiations began and remained after they concluded. Using a differences-in-differences estimator, I show that the daily rate of repression fell by between 10% and 30% during debt relief negotiations. This effect holds across autocracies and democracies, and during periods of sustained protests. When debt crises were more severe, debt relief negotiations were even more constraining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do autocrats employ propaganda to threaten citizens with repression? Do threats of repression condition citizen behavior? This article develops a theory of propaganda-based threats in autocracies that builds on insights from experimental psychology. It argues that even credible threats of repression are costly, and so are reserved for moments when collective action is most likely. Since threats of repression are employed sparingly, the authors also expect them to be effective. The theory is tested using data from China, the world's most populous autocracy. The study analyzes all 164,707 articles published between 2009 and 2016 in the Workers' Daily, a state-run newspaper that focuses on domestic issues and targets a non-elite audience. It finds that the Chinese government employs propaganda-based threats of repression primarily around the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang regions. Using an instrumental variables strategy, the study shows that these threats decrease protest rates by a substantively meaningful margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does propaganda reduce the rate of popular protest in autocracies? To answer this question, we draw on an original dataset of state-run newspapers from thirty countries, encompassing six languages and over four million articles. We find that propaganda diminishes the rate of protest, and that its effects persist over time. By increasing the level of pro-regime propaganda by one standard deviation, autocrats have reduced the odds of protest the following day by 15%. The half-life of this effect is between five and ten days, and very little of the initial effect persists after one month. This temporal persistence is remarkably consistent with campaign advertisements in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that leaders employ one of two strategies to govern subnational regions. These governance strategies, in turn, condition how leaders appoint and manage the regional executives to whom they delegate authority. In the co-optation strategy, leaders advance local welfare by appointing locally embedded regional executives, who are drawn from the local population and enjoy relatively long tenures. In the suppression strategy, leaders ensure that regional executives suppress local threats to the regime by minimizing local embeddedness, which entails appointing nonnative executives and shuffling them frequently. The regional governance strategy that a leader employs, we argue, depends on the region's ex ante level of regime support. We test the theory with original data from the Republic of Congo and Kenya, encompassing 250 regional executives across three presidents. Although incumbent governments in Congo and Kenya confront different local threats, our findings highlight how similarly they manage the trade-offs of local embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can propaganda produced by foreign adversaries shape public opinion in a target country? We develop a theoretical framework to understand outward-facing propaganda, which many autocrats employ to shape public opinion abroad. We argue that beliefs about foreign affairs are more susceptible to outward-facing propaganda than beliefs about domestic conditions. Empirically, we focus on RT (formerly Russia Today), a media platform the Russian government founded in 2005. After characterizing its content, we ask whether exposure to RT influences the beliefs of American consumers. Exposure to RT, we find, induces respondents to support America withdrawing from its role as a cooperative global leader by 10–20 percentage points. This effect is robust across measures, obtains across party lines, and persists even when we disclose that RT is financed by the Russian government. RT has no effect on Americans' views of domestic politics or the Russian government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have long observed that focal points enable citizens to coordinate collective action. For antiregime protests in autocracies, however, focal points also enable repressive governments to prepare in advance. We propose a theory to explain when citizens are likely to employ focal points to organize antiregime protests. Our key insight is that tacit coordination is most critical when explicit coordination is costly. Empirically, we use our theory to identify a setting where focal points are likely to be salient and then argue that the anniversaries of failed pro-democracy movements satisfy conditions for focality. In China, we find that the anniversaries of failed pro-democracy movements occasion nearly 30 percent more protests than any other day. Protests during pro-democracy anniversaries are more likely to employ "rights-conscious" discourse, which scholars have argued is code for democratic resistance, and to be repressed by the government. We find no similar trends for other holidays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The battle lines that currently animate politics in Central Africa's autocracies reach well beyond these countries' borders. As Western governments proved their willingness to sanction human rights abuses, Central Africa's autocrats sought to inoculate themselves by using their governments' financial resources to capture policy makers abroad. For recourse, citizens and diaspora communities turned to international judicial institutions, which they viewed—rightly, it turns out—as less susceptible to capture. In response, Central Africa's autocrats have developed new tools of survival. They have launched strikingly professional "image laundering" campaigns, a sustained assault on international law, and private financial institutions that enable sophisticated money laundering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's view on the benefits of global pressure in promoting term limits for presidents in African countries. These include Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi. He also notes the opposition of the public on their efforts in amending the constitution to extend their term.