How To Keep Citizens Disengaged: Propaganda and Causal Misperceptions

An important instrument of authoritarian rule is propaganda. While sometimes dictators attempt to manipulate citizens' beliefs of facts, some propaganda is more complex, weaving various socioeconomic factors into a narrative. We focus on the strongman narrative (SN), which asserts that regime strength causes high economic performance. Modeling the SN using Bayesian networks, we formally analyze the beliefs and behavior of citizens concerned that protests hurt economic performance via their adverse effect on regime strength. We show that this approach gives history a prominent role by influencing the inferences citizens make regarding the relationship between protests on economic performance—even in the absence of a direct causal link. A higher frequency of past protests suggests a lower correlation, rendering protests more likely in the present. We demonstrate that this "historical complementarity" creates multiple equilibria, explaining why some countries are more prone to frequent anti-government protests than others under similar conditions.