Oliver Lang

Propaganda must be consumed to be effective. As technological change reduces the costs of producing and disseminating media, entertainment media may out-compete traditional government-controlled news outlets for audiences' time and attention. To examine the causal effects of competition from entertainment media, I study how the airing of “Wetten Dass?”, the most popular entertainment program in West German television history, shaped the audience for East German propaganda. Linking weekly surveys of television viewership for over 800 thousand East Germans with digitized broadcast schedules for East and West German television, I find that competition from entertainment media decreased the audience share of concurrent propaganda broadcasts. However, competition from entertainment also durably increased the baseline size of audiences for propaganda newscasts airing just before Wetten Dass. The findings suggest that the rise of entertainment media induces a trade-off for authoritarian regimes: increasing total media and propaganda consumption in anticipation of entertainment, yet reducing propaganda's share of audience attention once audiences are forced to choose between entertainment and propaganda.

Conventional wisdom holds that modern autocrats differ from their historical predecessors because they rely on propaganda and institutions, not mass coercion, to rule. Yet despite the importance of institutions for autocratic governance, and the importance of propaganda's role in shaping public perceptions of autocratic rule, we know little about how propaganda covers the individuals and organizations that constitute governing institutions under autocracy. I argue that media coverage of governing institutions, not just of individual autocrats and socioeconomic conditions, is tactically framed by authoritarian regimes. Using transcripts of news broadcasts, I isolate mentions of governing institutions in over 52 thousand news broadcasts across 61 autocracies. I find that institutional actors are more likely to be mentioned in the context of negative news coverage than ruling autocrats, and that this discrepancy is present across all types of governing institutions. I also find that the valence of coverage of individual institutions is associated with the institutional basis of the autocratic regime: military and single-party regimes cover the "core" institutions of their regimes more positively.

Autocrats can intervene in media coverage of an issue either by censoring coverage unfavorable to the regime, or by pressuring outlets to change coverage so that it becomes favorable. Empirical studies of information control in authoritarian regimes generally examine such censorship and propaganda interventions in isolation, making it difficult to understand why regimes trade off between the two tactics. I combine fine-grained data on line edits in suggestions submitted to an East German newspaper by their state censors with article-level censorship decisions to empirically characterize this trade-off. I show that censorship interventions culling entire articles shift coverage away from broader issues not targeted by prior censorship, constraining the regime's ability to shape discussion of said issues through future propaganda.

Are voters more likely to support candidates who share their tribal identity? Does this relationship hold even where tribal identity is not linked to party and electoral institutions? These questions are difficult to answer using observational data because of measurement challenges, selection problems, or both. We address these empirical obstacles and questions in Tunisia, where successive governments tried to marginalize tribal identity. We match a historical dictionary of tribes to surnames from the universe of both registered voters and candidates in Tunisia's 2018 municipal elections. We find that lists characterized by high "affinity," where candidates share a tribal identity with voters, outperform lists with lower affinity. Our findings suggests that tribal identity, despite decades of marginalization, was politically salient in these elections, which were widely judged to be free and fair, and that Tunisia's largest and best organized parties were the primary beneficiaries of this "tribal advantage."

As global refugee flows accelerate, so does local news coverage on the subject and the potential for major political consequences. In an analysis of all broadcasts of the most famous television news program in Germany 2013-2019, we first show observationally (through text and image analysis) that refugee coverage increases with immigration and is correlated in different ways with public opinion about refugees. Conditioning on these patterns, we then implement a nationally representative block randomized media experiment. We find that TV news coverage of refugees causes viewers to be more willing to donate money to pro-refugee organizations, but surprisingly to feel colder and more socially distant towards them. We discuss the far reaching consequences of this divergent pattern for the future of local politics in Germany and potentially around the world.

This project investigates compliance with censorship directives during Brazil's military dictatorship. Using newly digitized archives of censorship orders and newspaper content, we examine which outlets complied with state censorship demands and why.

This project investigates the structure of preferences for propaganda across media market outlets. Allowing respondents to choose between the full slate of competing propaganda outlets in autocratic media markets allows us to estimate persuasion effects of propaganda conditional on the full set of underlying preferences over distinct outlets.