Oliver Lang
My research examines the organizational bases of information control and propaganda production under authoritarian rule. I study media outlets tasked with producing propaganda, state agencies exerting pressure on those outlets, and the interplay of economic imperatives and state coercion in autocratic media markets.
Articles
Propaganda and competition from entertainment media: evidence from East German television
Propaganda and Institutions: evidence from a global dataset of television news broadcasts
The trade-off between censorship and propaganda: evidence from East German newspaper coverage
Tribal voting in new democracies: evidence from 6 million Tunisian voter records
How increasing refugee visibility on TV news causes viewers to support refugees more, but like them less
with Adeline Lo
Work in progress
Film censorship in Weimar and Nazi Germany
with Christian Gläßel
Who complies with censorship: evidence from Brazilian censorship directives
with Tatiana Cruz, Ned Littlefield
Media market competition and preferences for propaganda
with Asya Magazinnik
Dissertation and book project
Propaganda and the logic of competition in autocratic media markets
Teaching
Causal Inference
Spring 2026 · Syllabus
Bio
I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a visiting researcher at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. My work spans comparative politics, political communication, and political economy.
Before coming to Madison, I completed my undergraduate studies in International and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington.