Internationalized Propaganda: Propaganda’s Sources and Its Perceived Credibility

Abstract

In authoritarian regimes, governments allow and facilitate the transmission of foreign information if it praises the regime and can function as propaganda. In this article, I define internationalized propaganda as pro-regime messages originating from foreign sources, while domestic propaganda refers to those from domestic sources. Additionally, I characterize two dimensions of variation in internationalized propaganda: the home countries and the long-standing stances of propaganda's foreign sources. Building upon the framework of internal and external forces proposed by Lupia and McCubbins (1998) and through a pre-registered survey experiment in China, I find evidence of internal forces influencing how people evaluate the credibility of domestic and internationalized propaganda: strong nationalists trust domestic propaganda whose sources resonate with their national pride, while weak nationalists trust internationalized propaganda from foreign sources that are usually critical of the regime. However, by further examining the variation in internationalized propaganda, I find that both strong and weak nationalists perceive the propaganda as more credible when its foreign source originates from a pro-regime country or when the source is described as supportive of the regime, contrary to the predictions based on internal forces. Through exploratory analyses, I identify two factors that hinder the functioning of internal forces in evaluating propaganda credibility: the insignificance of source differences in people's deliberate reasoning and an implicit pro-regime preference. This finding enhances our understanding of the increasingly sophisticated propaganda, its impact on citizens, and the psychological mechanisms involved.