Autocratic governments make claims about why they are entitled to rule. Some autocracies are more talkative than others, but all regimes say something about why they deserve power. This article takes seriously these efforts by introducing and interrogating the concept of autocratic legitimation. After engaging in a definitional discussion, it traces the development of autocratic legitimation in modern political science by identifying major turning points, key concepts, and patterns of inquiry over time. Ultimately, this introductory article aims to not only argue that studying autocratic legitimation is important, but also to propose context, concepts, and distinctions for doing so productively. To this end, the article proposes four mechanisms of autocratic legitimation that can facilitate comparative analysis: indoctrination, passivity, performance, and democratic-procedural. Finally, the essay briefly introduces the five original articles that comprise the remainder of this special issue on autocratic legitimation. The article identifies avenues for further research and identifies how each article in the issue advances down productive pathways of inquiry.

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Authoritarian states try to present a positive image of themselves abroad. They invest in foreign-facing media, retain public relations firms, and showcase their successes to elite and popular foreign audiences. But there is also a darker side to these efforts. Authoritarian states try to obscure or censor bad news about their governments and often discredit their critics abroad. In extreme cases, authoritarian states intimidate, physically attack, or even murder their opponents overseas. This book is about how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using both “promotional” tactics of persuasion and “obstructive” tactics of repression. They adopt these practices to enhance their internal and external regime security or, put differently, to make their world safe for dictatorship. To substantiate these arguments, the book uses a diverse array of data, including fieldwork and author interviews, cross-national data on extraterritorial repression, examination of public relations filings with the United States government, analysis of authoritarian propaganda, media frequency analysis, and speeches and statements by authoritarian leaders. It builds a new data set—the Authoritarian Actions Abroad Database—that uses publicly available information to categorize nearly 1,200 instances in which authoritarian states repressed their critical exiles abroad, ranging from vague threats to confirmed assassinations. It also selects three cases for closer examination to understand in more detail how authoritarian states manage their image abroad using combinations of promotional and obstructive tactics: China, Rwanda, and North Korea. The result is a new way of thinking about the international dimensions of authoritarian politics.

This article proposes and tests a mechanism of grassroots image management to explain how rising powers craft an international environment more conducive to their interests. The aim is to promote the state’s foreign policy goals by influencing the perceptions of ordinary foreign citizens. To test this mechanism, we examine the impact of China’s Confucius Institutes (CIs) as an observable instrument of China’s grassroots image management strategy. Using data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), we employ a spatial–temporal approach which finds that proximity to an active CI significantly and substantively improves the tone of media reporting about events relevant to China in that locality. The finding is robust to different specifications and estimation strategies, and is qualitatively consistent with results generated using household opinion data from Afrobarometer surveys. Theoretically, our results suggest the importance of systematically examining presentations and perceptions about rising powers at the popular level, in addition to focusing on elite attitudes, to understand discursive change. More directly, our findings reveal that CIs are helping to improve how China is viewed among foreign publics.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is aiming to reshape the global information sphere with a "worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition." 1 The roots of this campaign can be traced back at least as far as 2007, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began talking about "soft power" 2 at its Seventeenth Party Congress, held that year. Serious funding went into the effort in 2009, when the CCP under Hu Jintao devoted a sum then worth about US$7 billion to revamping the PRC's system for crafting and disseminating external propaganda. 3 Since then, money has continued to flow, underwriting PRC information operations that have been growing more sophisticated and complex under Hu�s successor Xi Jinping. Since he came to power in 2012, Beijing has become more aggressive in presenting itself to the world and pushing its message in ways that go well beyond traditional notions of communist propaganda. While veteran PRC-watchers have known this for some time, it took the coronavirus crisis to make plain to wider circles the depth, variety, and extent of Beijing's external-propaganda efforts. Pictures of jetliners unloading Chinese medical equipment, time-lapse videos of rapid hospital construction in Wuhan, and conspiracy theories pushed by Chinese diplomats flooded websites, including Twitter and Facebook, that are banned in the PRC. The first half of 2020 saw debates about whether China was "winning" or "losing" the battle of covid-19 narratives. Although evidence for the effectiveness of PRC propaganda remains scarce, there is a targeted, adaptable strategy behind the messaging, and we should assume a willingness to learn from mistakes and incidents of overreach. Since PRC propaganda is not going away and will likely be