Informational Interventions: State-Sponsored Influence Strategies and Impacts on Public Opinion

Abstract

Governments around the world regularly target information toward publics in other countries with the aim of influencing public opinion toward their own foreign policy goals. Despite almost a century of research in political science on propaganda, surprisingly little of this work draws the line between traditional propaganda and its evolving instantiations—social media mis- and disinformation—or governments’ utilization of technological advancements that enable the easy dissemination and concealment of influence. Further, despite our knowledge or suspicion of influence taking place, we have little research that tests whether and how such influence impacts public attitudes or behavior. In this dissertation, I present three essays exploring state-sponsored informational influence and its impacts on publics. I argue that foreign informational influence can achieve real attitudinal impacts on the publics of other states, posing significant threats to publics in both established democracies and states undergoing transitions from authoritarianism or experiencing democratic backsliding. In the first essay, I introduce the concept of an “informational intervention,” or a government’s use of information to foster attitudes or behaviors among citizens in another state. The essay presents a new framework for assessing the relative coherence and impact of government influence through information that highlights the continuities in the manifestation of such influence over time. Taking the Arab Spring uprisings as an example, I discuss the vulnerability and susceptibility to such influence in transitional political contexts, where enterprising actors can work toward achieving their foreign policy goals by impacting citizens' attitudes toward regime change, social trust, and political efficacy. I also introduce an index to measure the scope of an intervention and its effects on public attitudes or behavior and assess the success of an intervention relative to its scope. In the second essay, I present the design and results of a survey experiment testing the impact of revealing the existence of covert informational interventions on Tunisian citizens’ belief in the credibility of their media sources and on their attitudes toward the media content itself. I demonstrate that alerting respondents to foreign influence in the media can increase support for anti-democratic policies, a finding that suggests that foreign influence—and even just the suspicion of it—can decrease support for democracy, playing into the hands of autocrats. In the final essay, coauthored with Kevin Troy and Andi Zhou, I turn the focus of informational intervention to the United States. I present the design and results of a survey experiment testing the impact on American audiences of one overt intervention tactic, a political communication strategy which we term “ventriloquism”—when a messenger attributes their message to other sources. We find that citing an in-group source (an American professor in this case) can enhance the persuasiveness of the messaging and mitigate backlash against the source. The two experiments provide preliminary insights into the actual effects foreign governments’ messaging strategies can have on publics; informational interventions can advance intervenors’ goals, for example, to bolster an authoritarian ally or enhance the persuasiveness of a particular message. Taken together, these essays argue for thinking holistically about state intervention strategies because of their potentially destabilizing impacts on vulnerable publics in transitioning states, contributing to scholarship on the methods and implications of foreign influence in comparative politics and international relations.