The Art of Self-Criticism: How Autocrats Propagate Their Own Political Scandals

Abstract

ABSTRACT In liberal democracies, journalists can engage the government by unearthing its scandals. Authoritarian regimes, where negative news about the government is heavily guarded, lack this process. Yet, rulers in China do propagate political scandals about themselves. Why? I theorize that they do so to engage citizens with propaganda and strategically control their risk with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). I test my theory by analyzing a novel dataset of news stories and reader comments posted by Chinese citizens over the course of China’s anticorruption campaign between 2012 and 2015. My findings show that users’ comments about stories of corrupt national officials were unexpectedly lower than those about lower-ranking officials. Such irregularity suggests that either algorithms or censorship suppressed comments on national-level corruption, which indicates the ruler’s uneasiness toward propagating scandals that may implicate themselves. I also find that China’s rulers reduce their risks by outsourcing reports of their scandals to media outlets less closely linked to the state. My findings show that advancements in ICT and increasing competition among new media firms can help authoritarian rulers finetune their propaganda by promoting self-damaging political messages.