Why It Matters What Autocrats Say: Assessing Competing Theories of Propaganda

Abstract

This article investigates two accounts of political propaganda in autocratic regimes. One argues that propaganda's content does not matter substantively and that propaganda is mostly a signal of the regime's overwhelming power over citizens. A second argues that propaganda is substantively meaningful: autocrats may communicate strategically either by attracting attention through highlighting the regime's strengths or by distracting attention away from the regime's malperformance. Using nearly 135,000 North Korean state-generated news articles between 1997 and 2018 we show that North Korea systematically adjusted its communication strategies following the leadership transfer from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un.