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
Work in progress
Book project
Teaching
Bio
I am a post-doctoral fellow in Social Data Science at the Hertie School of Governance. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2026. My work spans comparative politics, political communication, and political economy.
My research is centered around three questions: How do autocratic regimes curtail the flow of information necessary for evaluating government performance? How do the institutions of autocratic governance constrain propaganda content? How does competition between media outlets shape coverage when markets are subject to government intervention?
Before coming to Madison, I completed my undergraduate studies in International and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington.