Authoritarian cue effect of state repression

Abstract

Students of authoritarian politics have long assumed that state repression and other social control policies will lead to attitudinal backlash against the government. However, in China where authoritarian social control is both intrusive and intensive, anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing levels of policing and repression do not always induce significant public opinion backlash. This paper proposes a general theoretical framework to understand how citizens react to governmental actions in authoritarian states by focusing on the question of why individuals might support intensive social control. We argue that when forming their attitude towards government actions and policies, citizens do not only consider the substantive content of the action or policy in question. Their opinion will also be influenced by an implicit cueing message signaling the position of the government on the policy. In other words, when informed with a government action, citizens might form their attitude based on the implicit message that “the government endorses this action”. The influence of “authoritarian cue” over public opinion is highly analogous to party cues or elite cues in democratic contexts, and we predict that a significant number of individuals will take this cueing message in decision-making and thus automatically adopt the position of the regime even in absence of substantive, persuasive messages justifying the action. In particular, focusing on the context of state repression, we conducted a survey experiment to empirically show that the outcome of state repression might be interpreted as a cue that signals the state’s stance on the nature of the behaviors involved. Hence, repression might induce the public to believe that these behaviors are dangerous or “bad” and hence warrant punishment. Under such circumstances, the state is unlikely to face public opinion backlash as citizens tend to consider repression as reasonable and necessary