Rumors, Propaganda, and Conspiracies: New Insights on the Ideological Dimensions of Democratic Backsliding and Autocratization
By Anne Wolf, University of Oxford, Kathrin Bachleitner, University of Oxford and Sarah Bufkin, University of Birmingham
Which factors help to explain the global tide in democratic backsliding and autocratization? What sustains these trends, and can they be countered? For a long time, scholarship focused on formal governing institutions in dictatorships and authoritarians’ modes of repression and control. Yet recent works—featured in this issue—also stress the importance of ideational factors, including the information environment. They discuss how rumors, propaganda, and conspiracies may prop up strongmen, returning scholarly attention to long-standing issues of ideology and legitimacy.