Peer-Reviewed Publications
Networked authoritarian governments' use of digital repression creates uncertainty and amplifies risk signals for ordinary citizens using social media for political expression. Employing theoretical frameworks from the risk and decision-making literature, we experimentally examine how citizens perceive and respond to the risks of low-effort forms of online activism in an authoritarian context. Our online field experiment demonstrates that emotional responses to the regime's risk signals about online activism drive decision-making about contentious online political expression as compared to cognitive appraisal of risk. Moreover, the relationship between anticipatory emotions and contentious online political expression varies significantly depending on individuals' involvement with the controversial topic of expression. We discuss the importance of emotions and citizen risk judgments for understanding online activism within networked authoritarian contexts.
The early hopes of the Internet as a technology of “liberation” have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication experience of citizens. Yet, the scholarship examining the underlying motivations and what influences individuals to employ censorship circumvention technologies (CCTs) in authoritarian contexts remains underdeveloped. We present a theoretical model of how state-sponsored political identity and attitudes about media freedom influence motivated resistance to censorship in the case of using CCTs to access social media and other forms of online content in the networked authoritarian context of Iran. Employing a web-based survey of Internet users (N=807), we test this theoretical model across a range of censored online content types. Our findings show that regime ideology in Iran indirectly influences CCT use through biasing perceptions of media freedom and how people respond to it in the form of a motivated resistance. We discuss theoretical and policy-related implications for resilience to censorship of social media and online content in networked authoritarian contexts.
This paper examines the social-psychological mechanisms behind how citizens deal with uncertainties stemming from the COVID-19 vaccine developments in societies with prominent social/political cleavages. We argue that existing social/political tensions influence individuals’ trust in institutions that are responsible for coping with crises through a motivated reasoning mechanism, which eventually shapes citizens’ COVID-19 vaccine intentions. Using a nationally representative face-to-face survey conducted in the pre-vaccination period in Turkey, we demonstrate that both self-identifying as a Kurd or feeling close to an opposition party are associated with lower trust in institutions actively dealing with the pandemic, which in turn, results in weaker intentions for getting vaccinated. Testing our full theoretical model reveals that while ethnic and partisan identities do not directly influence vaccine intentions, they exhibit an indirect negative effect via institutional trust impeding the fight against the pandemic. We show that it is difficult to tackle a sudden collective threat that requires public cooperation with health policies if the society is strongly polarized. Our findings offer key policy implications for the vaccination phase of the pandemic, and contribute to the domains of public health, conflict studies and individual judgment and decision-making about social risks.
Previous scholarship on networked authoritarianism has examined an array of repressive legal and political strategies employed by regimes to constrain online political expression. How the tension between citizens’ desires to engage in online political expression and the possible dire consequences of doing so is resolved, however, is understudied. We address this lacuna by drawing upon concepts from risk and decision-making research and examining how the emotional and cognitive components of risk and decision-making shape citizens’ online political expression. Employing a three-wave panel survey of Turkish internet users collected over eight months, our fixed-effects regression analyses show that anticipatory emotions drive expressive behavior, but that risk assessment does not. Furthermore, the influence of negative emotions on online expression is moderated by individuals’ degree of regime opposition. We discuss the importance of understanding the psychological mechanisms by which networked authoritarian contexts influences citizens’ decisions to engage in contentious online speech.
Authoritarian regimes commonly justify internet censorship by framing the internet as a threat to their citizens that must be tightly controlled for their own protection. This threat rhetoric underpins government censorship and creates a “psychological firewall” driving public support for a censored internet. Based on risk and decision-making scholarship we evaluate how mass media and partisan regime support promulgate these threat perceptions, and in turn how they influence citizen attitudes about censorship. Employing Russia as a case study, we tested our hypotheses with a national survey (N=1600) conducted in May 2014. We found that reliance on Russian national TV news predicted greater internet threat perceptions, and in turn these threat perceptions significantly increased support for online political censorship. Approval of the Putin government further amplified the impact of these threat perceptions on support for censorship. Implications for understanding psychological foundations for support for censorship in authoritarian contexts are discussed.
Why do citizens seek out alternative information sources via the Internet or social media in censored mass media environments? How do they react when they perceive their media freedom is threatened? Drawing upon theoretical work in psychological reactance and comparative democratization we propose a new communication construct called motivated resistance to censorship (MRC) that assesses cognitive and affective reactions to perceived threats to citizens’ media freedom, and in turn predicts online information-seeking as a mitigation strategy. We also evaluate how related concepts of willingness-to-self-censor (WTSC) and proneness-to-reactance (PtR) moderate the relationship between media freedom, perceived threats and MRC. We evaluate our proposed moderation-model within the context of Turkey, as there is a high level of government media censorship but still a comparatively open Internet information environment. Our analyses evaluating our model are based on two different surveys collected during the winter and spring of 2015. The first was a national face-to-face household survey of Turkish respondents (N=1161), while the second surveyed Turkish Internet users recruited through a commercial opt-in survey panel (N=2002). Our results validate the central propositions of our model that perceived threats to media freedom lead to reactance (MRC), which in turn predicts more frequent online political information-seeking behavior. In addition, we find that psychological traits related to WTSC and PtR either dampen or amplify the relationship between perceived threat and MRC, respectively. The contributions of adopting reactance theory to better understand citizen responses to media censorship, future directions for research, and policy implications are discussed.
The chapter examines two major impacts of increasingly pervasive information and communication technologies (ICT) usage, one on protest and social movements themselves and another on scholarship about these phenomena. For the former, we review research on ICT-enabled infrastructural changes within movements, including: (1) the introduction of new formats of protest and a new model of power; (2) the ability to organize outside of formal social movement organizations (SMOs) and/or within dramatically altered SMOs; and (3) the facilitation of transnational and non-Western protest and social movements. Regarding social movement scholarship, we argue that the information-saturated environments that social movements operate within increasingly require scholars to draw on political communication research. This connection may lead social movement scholars to complicate existing understandings (e.g., agenda setting), identify hitherto unexamined determinants of social movement effectiveness (e.g., priming), and add nuance to social movement scholars’ understanding of audiences and audience reception, among other topics.
The American electorate is characterized by political polarization, and especially by increasingly negative affective responses toward opposing party members. To what extent might this be attributed to exposure to information reinforcing individuals’ partisan identity versus information representing the views of partisan opponents? And is this a uniquely American phenomenon? This study uses survey data collected immediately following recent national elections in two countries, the United States and Israel, to address these questions. Results across the two nations are generally consistent, and indicate that pro- and counterattitudinal information exposure has distinct influences on perceptions of and attitudes toward members of opposing parties, despite numerous cross-cultural differences. We discuss implications in light of recent evidence about partisans’ tendency to engage in selective exposure.
Research Reports:
- Dal, A., Nisbet, E. C., & Kamenchuk, O. (Online First). Signaling Silence: Affective and Cognitive Responses to Risks of Online Activism about Corruption in an Authoritarian Context. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221135861
Networked authoritarian governments' use of digital repression creates uncertainty and amplifies risk signals for ordinary citizens using social media for political expression. Employing theoretical frameworks from the risk and decision-making literature, we experimentally examine how citizens perceive and respond to the risks of low-effort forms of online activism in an authoritarian context. Our online field experiment demonstrates that emotional responses to the regime's risk signals about online activism drive decision-making about contentious online political expression as compared to cognitive appraisal of risk. Moreover, the relationship between anticipatory emotions and contentious online political expression varies significantly depending on individuals' involvement with the controversial topic of expression. We discuss the importance of emotions and citizen risk judgments for understanding online activism within networked authoritarian contexts.
- Dal, A. & Nisbet, E. C. (2022). Walking through Firewalls: Circumventing Censorship of Social Media and Online Content in a Networked Authoritarian Context. Social Media+Society, (8)4, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221137738
The early hopes of the Internet as a technology of “liberation” have turned into a reinforcing spiral of control, innovation, resistance, and counter-innovation between authoritarian governments and those that seek to bypass censorship and digital repression. This spiral reflects that even most robust censorship mechanisms are vulnerable to circumvention, which has become a key concept for illustrating the contemporary online communication experience of citizens. Yet, the scholarship examining the underlying motivations and what influences individuals to employ censorship circumvention technologies (CCTs) in authoritarian contexts remains underdeveloped. We present a theoretical model of how state-sponsored political identity and attitudes about media freedom influence motivated resistance to censorship in the case of using CCTs to access social media and other forms of online content in the networked authoritarian context of Iran. Employing a web-based survey of Internet users (N=807), we test this theoretical model across a range of censored online content types. Our findings show that regime ideology in Iran indirectly influences CCT use through biasing perceptions of media freedom and how people respond to it in the form of a motivated resistance. We discuss theoretical and policy-related implications for resilience to censorship of social media and online content in networked authoritarian contexts.
- Dal, A. & Tokdemir, E. (2022). Social-Psychology of Vaccine Intentions: The Mediating Role of Institutional Trust in the Fight Against Covid-19. Political Behavior, 44, 1459–1481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09793-3
This paper examines the social-psychological mechanisms behind how citizens deal with uncertainties stemming from the COVID-19 vaccine developments in societies with prominent social/political cleavages. We argue that existing social/political tensions influence individuals’ trust in institutions that are responsible for coping with crises through a motivated reasoning mechanism, which eventually shapes citizens’ COVID-19 vaccine intentions. Using a nationally representative face-to-face survey conducted in the pre-vaccination period in Turkey, we demonstrate that both self-identifying as a Kurd or feeling close to an opposition party are associated with lower trust in institutions actively dealing with the pandemic, which in turn, results in weaker intentions for getting vaccinated. Testing our full theoretical model reveals that while ethnic and partisan identities do not directly influence vaccine intentions, they exhibit an indirect negative effect via institutional trust impeding the fight against the pandemic. We show that it is difficult to tackle a sudden collective threat that requires public cooperation with health policies if the society is strongly polarized. Our findings offer key policy implications for the vaccination phase of the pandemic, and contribute to the domains of public health, conflict studies and individual judgment and decision-making about social risks.
- Dal, A. & Nisbet, E. C. (2022). To share or not to share? How emotional judgements drive online political expression in high-risk contexts. Communication Research, 49(3), 353-375. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220950570
Previous scholarship on networked authoritarianism has examined an array of repressive legal and political strategies employed by regimes to constrain online political expression. How the tension between citizens’ desires to engage in online political expression and the possible dire consequences of doing so is resolved, however, is understudied. We address this lacuna by drawing upon concepts from risk and decision-making research and examining how the emotional and cognitive components of risk and decision-making shape citizens’ online political expression. Employing a three-wave panel survey of Turkish internet users collected over eight months, our fixed-effects regression analyses show that anticipatory emotions drive expressive behavior, but that risk assessment does not. Furthermore, the influence of negative emotions on online expression is moderated by individuals’ degree of regime opposition. We discuss the importance of understanding the psychological mechanisms by which networked authoritarian contexts influences citizens’ decisions to engage in contentious online speech.
- Nisbet, E.C., Kamenchuk, O., & Dal, A. (2017) A psychological firewall? Risk perceptions and public support for online censorship in Russia. Social Science Quarterly, 98(3), 958-975. doi:10.1111/ssqu.12435
Authoritarian regimes commonly justify internet censorship by framing the internet as a threat to their citizens that must be tightly controlled for their own protection. This threat rhetoric underpins government censorship and creates a “psychological firewall” driving public support for a censored internet. Based on risk and decision-making scholarship we evaluate how mass media and partisan regime support promulgate these threat perceptions, and in turn how they influence citizen attitudes about censorship. Employing Russia as a case study, we tested our hypotheses with a national survey (N=1600) conducted in May 2014. We found that reliance on Russian national TV news predicted greater internet threat perceptions, and in turn these threat perceptions significantly increased support for online political censorship. Approval of the Putin government further amplified the impact of these threat perceptions on support for censorship. Implications for understanding psychological foundations for support for censorship in authoritarian contexts are discussed.
- Behrouzian, G., Nisbet, E. C., Dal, A., & Carkoglu, A. (2016). Resisting censorship: How citizens navigate closed-media environments. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4345-4367.
Why do citizens seek out alternative information sources via the Internet or social media in censored mass media environments? How do they react when they perceive their media freedom is threatened? Drawing upon theoretical work in psychological reactance and comparative democratization we propose a new communication construct called motivated resistance to censorship (MRC) that assesses cognitive and affective reactions to perceived threats to citizens’ media freedom, and in turn predicts online information-seeking as a mitigation strategy. We also evaluate how related concepts of willingness-to-self-censor (WTSC) and proneness-to-reactance (PtR) moderate the relationship between media freedom, perceived threats and MRC. We evaluate our proposed moderation-model within the context of Turkey, as there is a high level of government media censorship but still a comparatively open Internet information environment. Our analyses evaluating our model are based on two different surveys collected during the winter and spring of 2015. The first was a national face-to-face household survey of Turkish respondents (N=1161), while the second surveyed Turkish Internet users recruited through a commercial opt-in survey panel (N=2002). Our results validate the central propositions of our model that perceived threats to media freedom lead to reactance (MRC), which in turn predicts more frequent online political information-seeking behavior. In addition, we find that psychological traits related to WTSC and PtR either dampen or amplify the relationship between perceived threat and MRC, respectively. The contributions of adopting reactance theory to better understand citizen responses to media censorship, future directions for research, and policy implications are discussed.
- Earl, J., Hunt J., Garrett, R. K., & Dal, A. (2015). New Technologies and Social Movements. In D. della Porta & M. Diani (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. Oxford University Press.
The chapter examines two major impacts of increasingly pervasive information and communication technologies (ICT) usage, one on protest and social movements themselves and another on scholarship about these phenomena. For the former, we review research on ICT-enabled infrastructural changes within movements, including: (1) the introduction of new formats of protest and a new model of power; (2) the ability to organize outside of formal social movement organizations (SMOs) and/or within dramatically altered SMOs; and (3) the facilitation of transnational and non-Western protest and social movements. Regarding social movement scholarship, we argue that the information-saturated environments that social movements operate within increasingly require scholars to draw on political communication research. This connection may lead social movement scholars to complicate existing understandings (e.g., agenda setting), identify hitherto unexamined determinants of social movement effectiveness (e.g., priming), and add nuance to social movement scholars’ understanding of audiences and audience reception, among other topics.
- Garrett, R. K., Dvir Gvirsman, S., Johnson, B. K., Tsfati, Y., Neo, R., & Dal, A. (2014). Implications of pro- and counterattitudinal information exposure for affective polarization. Human Communication Research, 40, 309-332. doi: 10.1111/hcre.12028
The American electorate is characterized by political polarization, and especially by increasingly negative affective responses toward opposing party members. To what extent might this be attributed to exposure to information reinforcing individuals’ partisan identity versus information representing the views of partisan opponents? And is this a uniquely American phenomenon? This study uses survey data collected immediately following recent national elections in two countries, the United States and Israel, to address these questions. Results across the two nations are generally consistent, and indicate that pro- and counterattitudinal information exposure has distinct influences on perceptions of and attitudes toward members of opposing parties, despite numerous cross-cultural differences. We discuss implications in light of recent evidence about partisans’ tendency to engage in selective exposure.
Research Reports:
- Dal, A., Nisbet, E. C., & Carkoglu, A. (2016). "Patterns of News Media Consumption and Social Media Use in Turkey" in Rising Soft Powers: Turkey, USC Center for Public Diplomacy.
- Nisbet, E. C., Dal, A., Behrouzian, G., & Carkoglu, A. (October, 2015). Benchmarking demand: Turkey's contested Internet". Center for Global Communication Studies, The Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania.
