CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Mommadova, Yana |
|---|---|
| Title | The Bear Is Back! Fear the Bear! Propaganda and Regime Survival in Putin's Russia |
| Summary | This study attempts to assess the factors that contribute to the resilience of competitive authoritarian regimes. While most of the scholarly works concentrate primarily on electoral competition, state coercive capacity, manipulation of legislature and elite co-optation, this research focuses on state propaganda, arguing that this factor is an important source of popular appeal of competitive authoritarian governments, as well as, the factor which contributes to their survival. In order to test this assumption this study takes the case of Russian propaganda during the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 and narrows the scope down to how the Russian media frames the topic of economic sanctions implemented against Russia by the Western governments. This research also assesses whether any of these media frames resonated among the Russian public. Framing analysis of Russian TV news alongside of the qualitative content analysis of textual transcripts were utilized in order to extract major media frames employed by the Russian media to cover the topic of economic sanctions. Consequently, public resonance of media frames was measured by matching the results from content analysis to opinion polls conducted in Russia in relation to the topic of economic sanctions and social actors who were prominent in the TV coverage. The results demonstrate that the Russian media employed powerful frames with regards to the topic of economic sanctions and, most importantly, the majority of these frames resonated successfully among Russian people. This research, thus, raises troubling questions about the prospects for democratization not only in Putin’s Russia but in other competitive authoritarian states where state propaganda is responsible for a large scale misinformation of ordinary citizens. |
| Supervisor | Fumagalli, Matteo |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/mommadova_yana.pdf |
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