Upcoming Talks
After Repression: The Impacts of Confession Propaganda upon Failed Uprisings
Date: March 26, 2025
Time: 10 pm Hong Kong Time ; 9 am Central Time; 10 am Eastern Time; 7 am Pacific Time
Speaker: Ruilin Lai, Washington University in St. Louis
Discussant: Haifeng Huang, Ohio State University
Registration Required
In the aftermath of unsuccessful uprisings, many autocrats broadcast dissidents’ confessions to their wrongdoings. Despite the prevalence of confession propaganda in the authoritarian world, its influence on the mass public – the very audience exposed to such political messaging – remains undertheorized and untested in existing scholarship. We theorize the impacts of confession propaganda on different political camps and experimentally test the observable implications in an autocratizing Hong Kong, where the political divide between regime supporters and opponents has remained salient since the failed uprising and institutionalized repression in 2020. The findings from our preregistered experiment ($N=3,448$) indicate that confession propaganda not only fails to appease the existing support base, but also triggers attitudinal backlash among moderates. However, it helps to deter dissent by inducing self-censorship among opponents. These results elucidate the toolkit and mechanism by which autocrats can stabilize their regime following large-scale repression of dissent.
Speaker
Ruilin Lai is a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies authoritarian politics, as well as media bias and media capture in democratic contexts. His work has appeared (or has been accepted) in the British Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, among other outlets.
Discussant
Haifeng Huang is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His current research focuses on information flow and public opinion dynamics, including propaganda, misinformation and misperception, foreign information, and political trust, especially in the context of China. He has also studied economic reform, social transition, media freedom, and electoral competition. His research has appeared in American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Journal of Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Behavior, among other journals. He teaches courses on information politics, authoritarian politics, game theory, and Chinese politics. Previously, he taught at the University of California, Merced, and was a Campbell National Fellow and the Susan Louise Dyer Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
More to Come
To Be Announced.