Comparing Authoritarian Publics: The Benefits and Risks of Three Types of Publics for Autocrats

Abstract

Researchers comparing political communication across non-democratic contexts presently lack a widely acknowledged theoretical framework to guide their efforts. In order to fill in this gap, this essay develops a theoretical account that proposes comparing not authoritarian media systems, but “authoritarian publics.” Drawing on theories of the multiple public sphere, two typologies are delineated: (a) a three-fold typology of partial publics, operating within authoritarian regimes and (b) a three-fold typology of “publics-at-large,” to be distinguished across authoritarian regimes. As it is argued, the publics-at-large of authoritarian regimes can be composed of three types of partial publics: (a) uncritical, (b) policy-critical, and (c) leadership-critical publics. With reference to political science literature about the emergence of formally democratic institutions in non-democratic regimes, critical publics are interpreted as institutions that help autocrats carry out important tasks. The benefits and risks associated with critical publics for autocrats are comparable to those of other pseudo-democratic institutions.

YouTube as Alternative Television in Russia: Political Videos During the Presidential Election Campaign 2018

“…The videos were coded according to the level of criticism of a political leader that could be observed in their content: uncritical, policy-critical, and leadership-critical (Toepfl, 2020). The analysis shows that 16% of the videos constituted uncritical publics, 35% were policy-critical ones, and 49% were leadership-critical.…”

“…Researchers have described different benefits as well as risks that so-called "input institutions" (Nathan, 2003) have brought to authoritarian leaders (He & Warren, 2011;Toepfl, 2018;Truex, 2017). These institutions, which include, among other things, media, help elites gather citizen feedback for the government, co-opt the opposition, and give an opportunity for antagonists of the regime to "vent their anger" as well as to resolve social conflicts (Toepfl, 2020). The main risk of input institutions for the state is that providing a certain degree of freedom of expression may place the legitimacy of the ruling elites under question and thus endanger the regime (Stockmann, 2013;Toepfl, 2020).…”

“…As Toepfl (2020) has suggested in his recent theory of authoritarian publics, China and Russia represent two different types of authoritarian regimes that diverge in the discursive practices dominant in their publics-at-large. According to Toepfl, China has a policy-critical public-at-large, where criticism of policies as well as of lower-level officials is tolerated, but not that of the country's highest-ranking leaders.…”

“…It is based on a qualitative content analysis of 169 political videos from the top 12 most popular videos on Russian YouTube. I have analyzed the public created on Russian YouTube around political topics during presidential election by drawing on Toepfl's (2020) theoretical approach to publics under authoritarian rule. Toepfl has suggested distinguishing between three types of authoritarian publics according to discursive practices typical of these publics: uncritical publics, policy-critical publics, and leadership-critical publics.…”

The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere, Its Features in the Context of Various Political Regimes, and Its Possible Influence on Political Processes

“…Therefore, scientists often avoid using the concept of the public sphere in relation to undemocratic countries, especially when it comes to apparent dictatorships and hard authoritarian regimes, or they use neutral substitute terms ("public-at-large" (e.g. Toepfl, 2019)) in order to somehow denote the entirety of various publics existing there. However, this caution does not seem fully justified since it significantly reduces the use of the concept of the public sphere, forcing it to limit the scope of its application exclusively to those political systems that are characterized in political science as full democracies.…”