ORCID

0000-0001-5948-5354

Date of Award

5-8-2024

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Political Science

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Conventional wisdom has long regarded censorship as a top-down, repressive tool for authoritarian governments to suppress political criticism and maintain regime stability, and therefore unpopular among the public. This dissertation proposes a novel normalization theory and presents various pieces of empirical evidence to challenge these conventional understandings of censorship and public opinion in authoritarian regimes. In the first chapter, I introduce the normalization theory and claim that the Chinese public does not necessarily perceive online censorship as repressive but as a normal part of Internet governance. Drawing from around 28 million censored posts on social media and two survey experiments, I demonstrate that, in addition to politically threatening content, non-political content is also censored on a substantial scale, which subsequently increases public support for censorship. In the second chapter, I further investigate why the public perceives censorship as normal by analyzing public participation in the censorship process. I propose a novel bottom-up perspective on censorship and demonstrate that censorship participation leads to higher public support for the censorship apparatus. In the third chapter, I challenge the conventional wisdom that authoritarian censorship tends to target positive exposure of foreign liberal democracies. Using a novel dataset of Chinese social media articles about liberal democracies from 2018 to 2022, I show that impeding mass exposure to democratic institutions rather than defaming the West is the primary strategy of Chinese censorship. This study underscores the Chinese regime's lingering insecurity about public knowledge of liberal democratic systems. Taken together, this dissertation highlights how the normalization of censorship, ordinary citizens' participation, and strategic censorship of information about democracy contribute to maintaining public support and sustaining regime survival in autocracies.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

Margit Tavits

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