13:10 - 14:50
P3
Room: South Room 224
Panel Session 3
Fabio Angiolillo - Nicodemite Middle Class: how “semi-contentious” political behavior defines professional careers’ choices in single-party regimes
Haifeng Huang - Championing Democracy in an Authoritarian Society: The Limited Effects of American Public Diplomacy in China
Amy Yunyu Chiang, Marlene Mauk - Repression's Effects on Protests and Political Attitudes towards the State
Tore Wig - Autocrats and the Academy: Empirical evidence on how dictatorships shape science
Championing Democracy in an Authoritarian Society: The Limited Effects of American Public Diplomacy in China
P3-01
Presented by: Haifeng Huang
Haifeng Huang
University of California, Merced
Can informational public diplomacy effectively promote democracy in an authoritarian society? The literature on public diplomacy has largely focused on the content and strategies of messaging rather than its actual effects, particularly with regards to messages targeting authoritarian countries. I conducted two online survey experiments, respectively in late 2018 and early 2021, to investigate the effects of the US Embassy in China’s public diplomacy efforts on Chinese social media promoting American democracy. The 2018 experiment was conducted when Sino-US relationship was relatively normal, while the 2021 experiment was conducted when the bilateral relationship has become tense and when the international image of the US has worsened due to its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection in Washington DC. In both experiments, I find the US Embassy’s social media articles largely had no effects on the respondents’ views on the US, democracy, or China. Whether the articles were attributed to the US Embassy or not generally did not make a difference either. These results suggest the most powerful democracy’s efforts to promote liberty and democratic governance through social media engagement is not effective in China even when the international environment for public diplomacy is relatively benign, but it does not backfire either, as some have suspected, even when the international environment is not conducive to public diplomacy. Further, the brand name of the US embassy neither helps nor harms the messaging. The US Embassy’s diplomatic messaging in the world’s largest authoritarian society simply has null effects.