How State Repression Cues Citizens to Support It

🔎 Research Question

Does state repression itself — even without deliberate information manipulation — change public attitudes so that citizens come to endorse the punished behaviors' condemnation and support further repression? The paper introduces the "authoritarian cue effect," where citizens interpret acts of repression as signals of the regime's disapproval and update their beliefs and attitudes accordingly.

📋 How a survey experiment tests whether repression reshapes beliefs

A novel belief-correction survey experiment is used to assess whether exposure to instances of state repression leads people to:

• perceive the targeted behavior as having greater negative externalities, and
• express higher support for state repression.

The design isolates the effect of repression cues from active government information manipulation or exploitation of social cleavages, focusing on whether repression can endogenously generate its own attitudinal support.

📈 Key Findings

• Instances of state repression prompt members of the public to pick up on cues embedded in those actions and to adopt the state's stance on the punished behaviors.
• Exposure to repression increases perceptions that the targeted behaviors produce negative externalities.
• These shifted perceptions correlate with increased support for further state repression.

⚖️ Why It Matters

The authoritarian cue effect implies that repression can self-legitimize: by signaling disapproval, repressive acts can produce public acceptance without the overt costs of propaganda or coercive persuasion. This mechanism helps explain how authoritarian regimes may evade public opinion backlash and sustain punitive policies more cheaply than previously assumed.