The CASSM Colloquium Series is a space for researcher's interested in receiving feedback on their experimental designs prior to gathering any data. The abstract for this week's presenter can be found below.
Autocrats frequently invoke narratives about the nation’s past to justify their power and policies. But does this actually lead to the formation of cognitive links between historical narratives and contemporary policies in citizens’ minds? Can propaganda exploit such links – through identity propaganda – to shape beliefs by just addressing the past, without even mentioning policies or the regime? This paper introduces the concept of spillover effects: the capacity of propaganda addressing the nation’s past to influence beliefs about current policies that the regime justifies through historical narratives, without raising those policies directly. I argue that these spillover effects are moderated by two factors: individuals’ pre-existing attachment to the nation’s past, and the belief systems through which they cognitively link that past to contemporary regimes and policies. To test these claims, I conduct a survey experiment with 2,000 participants in Russia, randomly exposing participants to either a politically neutral news extract or a state media segment promoting narratives about the Great Patriotic War. I measure post-treatment beliefs about Vladimir Putin, Western sanctions, the foreign agents law, military mobilisation, and Russian expansion in the former Communist space — policies the regime has framed through Soviet-era narratives — without any of these issues appearing in the treatment. This design allows me to test both direct effects of identity propaganda on historical beliefs and spillover effects on contemporary policy beliefs, as well as the moderating roles of pre-existing beliefs and belief systems. The paper contributes to literatures on authoritarian politics and political communication by showing how propaganda can subtly shift beliefs about salient issues while circumventing the risks of directly addressing unpopular policies, and by shifting analytical attention from what propaganda explicitly says to how it exploits pre-existing cognitive structures.
