This article describes how and why propaganda affected recipients differently in two distinct situations, namely forced exposure and selective exposure, when they received propaganda during a series of six original survey experiments conducted in China. The prevailing view is that people are more likely to resist information they receive if their exposure to it is forced. But the study addressed in this article found that citizens who prefer not to view propaganda news, when given a choice, actually demonstrate higher average treatment effects on pro-regime attitudes compared to those who willingly read propaganda news (i.e. where participants in the control group were assigned a reading of non-propaganda news). Moreover, this study shows that participants who prefer not to read propaganda news exhibit higher average treatment effects when rating the issue presented in the news as more understandable and important—compared to those who willingly engage with the propaganda. That suggests a possible rationalization pathway in this phenomenon.1

Propagandists discredit political ideas that rival their own. In China’s state-run media, one common technique is to place the phrase so-called, in English, or 所谓, in Chinese, before the idea to be discredited. In this research note we apply quantitative text analysis methods to over 45,000 Xinhua articles from 2003 to 2022 containing so-called or 所谓 to better understand the ideas the government wishes to discredit for different audiences. We find that perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty consistently draw usage of the term and that a theme of rising importance is political rivalry with the United States. When it comes to differences between internal and external propaganda, we find broad similarities, but differences in how the US is discredited and more emphasis on cooperation for foreign audiences. These findings inform scholarship on comparative authoritarian propaganda and Chinese propaganda specifically.

This article examines the German Communist Party’s (KPD’s) propaganda campaign during the Reichstag election in the summer of 1932. It asks why a movement which openly rejected parliamentary democracy fervently contested elections and it analyzes the KPD’s strategy, campaign organization, and publicity. The article argues that the party’s culture created a distinctive electoral appeal. As a Stalinized, heavily bureaucratized party, the KPD ran a centralized campaign with tightly controlled ideological messaging. Yet its leadership was also able to compete with better-funded rivals by tapping the party’s ethos of revolutionary activism and showing hitherto unrecognized pragmatism in encouraging independence and initiative. Supercharged by an extra-parliamentary campaign that summer, the KPD waged an edgy, violent “battle of symbols” in the streets which united the party’s revolutionary aims with its supporters’ neighborhood activism. Revolutionary mass propaganda projected a uniquely Communist visual and audio appeal, embodying protest, poverty, and radicalism.

This article is concerned with the history of eugenic sterilisation in Britain through the 1920s and 1930s. In this period, the Eugenics Society mounted an active but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to legalise the voluntary surgical sterilisation of various categories of people, including those deemed ‘mentally deficient’ or ‘defective’. We take as our explicit focus the propaganda produced and disseminated by the Eugenics Society as part of this campaign, and especially the various kinds of data mobilised therein. The parliamentary defeat of the Society’s Sterilisation Bill in July 1931 marks, we argue, a significant shift in the tactics of the campaign. Before this, the Eugenics Society framed sterilisation as a promising method for eradicating, or at least significantly reducing the incidence of, inherited ‘mental defect’. Subsequently, they came to emphasise the inequality of access to sterilisation between rich and poor, (re)positioning theirs as an egalitarian campaign aimed at extending a form of reproductive agency to the disadvantaged. These distinct phases of the campaign were each supported by different kinds of propaganda material, which in turn centred on very different types of data. As the campaign evolved, the numbers and quantitative rhetoric which typified earlier propaganda materials gave way to a more qualitative approach, which notably included the selective incorporation of the voices of people living with hereditary ‘defects’. In addition to exposing a rupture in the Eugenics Society’s propagandistic data practices, this episode underscores the need to further incorporate disabled dialogues and perspectives into our histories of eugenics.

During World War II, Disney films on Nazism, health, and United States–Latin American friendship flickered across screens throughout Latin America. They were the centerpiece of an unprecedented propaganda program by the United States, and they were shown to Latin Americans both in theaters and through mobile projectors by the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). While the OIAA and the Disney films have received considerable scholarly attention, the complex collaboration between the government organization, communication scientists, the animation film studio, and local actors in creating, distributing, and measuring propaganda has not. With the goal of creating favorable attitudes toward the United States in the minds of individual Latin Americans, the OIAA and Disney developed a novel propaganda approach based on entertainment and education. They coupled it with a comprehensive distribution system based on local projectionists who showed the films to millions of Latin Americans and measured their reactions. Local governments allowed and supported these free screenings to bolster their own popularity. Latin American voices to criticize the US instrumentalization of Disney were few, and the overall reception of the films was very positive. On the basis of an inadequate evaluation that equated popularity and reach with effect, the Disney films were considered successful propaganda by the OIAA, paving the way for a global application of the new propaganda approach. Disney propaganda for Latin America was driven by the involved actor’s unbounded faith in film’s suitability for propaganda and must thus be understood as a hype around the untapped potential of a relatively new medium.

This article explores Britain and the Soviet Union’s reciprocal exhibitions in 1961. Using methods from diplomatic and cultural history the article finds that, while typical of the cultural encounters that punctuated moments of Cold War crisis, these exhibitions formed part of a broader British policy of cultural diplomacy. The British state worked closely with the exhibition companies to present subtle propaganda about the British way of life at both displays. Britain’s key propaganda message was that a system of free enterprise was vital to a good political system and economy. However, while the fairs were nominally organised by an independent company many of the company’s directors were part of a network that existed between government, the civil service and business. The government was involved at all stages. A warm attitude was displayed towards the Soviets by many British people when the reciprocal fair opened in London, despite the less positive reception of Soviet consumer goods in the press. The British state sought to limit the Soviets’ propaganda gain. It therefore ensured that it was the trade fair’s organisers rather than communist supporting organisations who received the visit of the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.

Extensive research showcases that authoritarian propaganda can cultivate support and deter protest during “normal” times. This study examines authoritarian propaganda’s efficacy during crises and policy changes when the regime needs it most. We posit that various propaganda strategies, including “hard” and “soft” rhetoric, have significant limitations during crises. Hard propaganda’s heavy-handed slogans could signal regime strength but may also legitimize “rightful resistance” against local authorities, limiting its protest-deterrence effects. Soft propaganda may lose persuasiveness due to presenting contradictory arguments during policy changes. We leverage the turbulent period of China’s COVID policy reversal to conduct an original survey experiment in December 2022. Our findings reveal that pro-reopening hard propaganda weakens its protest-deterrence effects by reinforcing belief in protest righteousness. Moreover, inconsistent soft propaganda lowers public evaluations of China’s COVID response, diminishing its persuasive effects. Our study highlights significant limitations of authoritarian propaganda during crises and policy changes.

The Publicity Department of the Austrian Fatherland Front served the Ständestaat regime (1933–38). An elaborate organization on paper, the Fatherland Front's actual work was bound up in the performance of para-fascism and the surveillance of opposing parties. Each of these modes of being mutually reinforced the need for the other and created a unique self-awareness of failure within the movement. As such, the Publicity Department offers a microcosm of the larger challenges of the Ständestaat, which faltered in the face of economic collapse, political violence, and a population largely indifferent to its attempt to secure Austrian sovereignty in the 1930s.

Japan's information policy did not change suddenly during the Manchurian Crisis in September 1931-March 1933. Rather there was continuing development of state policy and institutions for news propaganda in response to two ongoing phenomena: growing mass political participation as indicated by universal manhood suffrage, and technological changes in mass media and communication.

The Japanese metropolitan government did, however, begin a coordinated and systematic approach to news propaganda during the Manchurian Crisis, one primarily driven by foreign policy concerns, rather than concerns with domestic thought control. At the same time, in the period that is often regarded as the beginning of Japan's diplomatic isolationism, MOFA and other foreign policy elites actively sought to engage international public opinion through management of the news for overseas propaganda. They further emphasized coordination between metropolitan centre, Tokyo, and a parallel news institution in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1931-3. The process of unifying news coverage, however, met strong oppositions from various stake holders in 1931-5.

The Forum Augustum represents one of the most important examples of the public and material dissemination of Augustan ideology. This paper offers a new model for understanding how the Forum's spatial and architectural design communicated that ideology. Departing from scholarly emphasis on the Forum's statuary programme, it examines how the Forum's spaces set up a series of contrasts that structured visitors’ experiences. In the porticoes, the extensive statue programme granted viewers a wide range of choices about what they could see. In the central square and hemicycles (exedrae), however, visitors were compelled by the paucity of material to encounter certain images and ideas. This argument shows a new way of understanding the Forum, where movement into and between certain spaces structured how Augustan ideology was communicated, received, and understood.

This essay explores new aspects of wartime Japan's industrial mobilization by analyzing how the country's struggling silk industry persistently exploited the emerging myth of Japan's paratroopers. With the outbreak of the Pacific War, Japan's silk manufacturers suffered from a ban on luxury goods and the collapse of the U.S. export market. After several spectacular Japanese airborne operations, the Dainippon Silk Foundation successfully campaigned for the large-scale production of parachutes. Silk now was a material for military consumption, and silk weaving companies became designated munitions factories that publicly compared the self-sacrifice of their young female workers with that of the death-defying paratroopers.

This article argues that the late Soviet period saw a new form of Ukrainian nationhood emerge, one based less on ethno-historical commonalities than on territorial and institutional cohesion. Combining Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism” with Alexei Yurchak’s analysis of “hypernormalized authoritative discourse,” it shows that Soviet Ukrainian leaders reproduced the assumption of Ukrainian nationhood even as they deprived it of concrete political and cultural content. While First Secretary Petro Shelest still promoted ethno-historical topoi alongside pride in Ukraine’s republican quasi-statehood, his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsʹkyi preferred an image of Ukraine as a productive economic space free of ethnic specificity. Late Soviet Ukrainian banal nationalism left traces in everyday life, whether in sports reporting, school curricula, or in a specific visual language combining institutional emblems with politically empty ethnic symbols. During perestroika, late Soviet banal nationalism was appropriated and instrumentalized first by the national-democratic opposition, and later by “national communists.”

As relations between the United States and China have grown tenser, how has the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) portrayal of the United States changed? And what might portrayals of the United States tell us about domestic messaging in China? This study systematically investigates CCP messaging about the United States in the contemporary era. To do this, we hand code, categorize and analyse 1,761 editorials about the United States published between 2003 and 2022 in People's Daily, the Party's flagship newspaper. In addition to showing a sustained rise in critical portrayals since 2018, we identify and elaborate three distinct critical narratives about the United States: it is a dangerous hegemon abroad, it has poor values at home, and it is increasingly weak and in decline. These narratives appear both independently and in combination and are often framed to contrast with portrayals of China. We argue that these narratives are not just negative propaganda to discredit the United States but can also be a strategy to promote a positive vision of the CCP's virtues and governance at home. This study contributes empirically and theoretically to research on propaganda and legitimation in China.