Research

There is growing awareness of how autocrats use propaganda to generate and sustain mass support, yet much of this attention focuses on the influence of directly state-owned media. This article shifts the spotlight to proxy-owned media—private outlets controlled by individuals with informal ties to autocratic regimes. In autocracies around the world, proxy media are on the rise, overtaking traditional state-run outlets as the most prevalent and far-reaching source of propaganda. Unlike state media, proxy outlets maintain a veneer of political independence, making them appear more trustworthy to skeptical audiences. This article highlights gaps in public knowledge about the true ownership of proxy outlets, explores how these gaps may make otherwise skeptical people more likely to consume and believe proregime news, and suggests ways journalists, activists, and the public can counter proxy media's influence.

We describe a natural experiment occasioned by an abrupt increase in the transmission range of an independent Tanzanian radio station whose broadcasts emphasize current affairs and gender equality. Some villages that formerly lay outside the catchment area of this radio station could now receive it, while nearby villages remained outside of reception range. Prior to the change in transmitter range in 2018, we conducted a baseline survey in both treated and untreated villages and found them to be similar in terms of prevailing social attitudes and political interest. An endline survey conducted in 2020 shows that respondents in areas that received the new radio signal were substantially more likely to listen to the station, and their levels of political interest and knowledge about domestic politics were significantly higher than their counterparts in villages where the signal could not reach. Attitude change on a range of gender issues, however, was sporadic.

Donald P. Green, Dylan W. Groves, Constantine Manda, Beatrice Montano, and Bardia Rahmani

Autocratic regimes increasingly rely on covert strategies to control the media, including capturing outlets through proxies and bribing media owners. How does covert media capture shape the effectiveness of autocrats’ persuasive communication? I explore this question through a series of preregistered experiments in which Tanzanian participants are randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) informed that certain media outlets are secretly owned by ruling party affiliates, (2) left uninformed, or (3) misinformed that these outlets are independent. Under conditions of ignorance or misinformation, regime supporters and opponents consume captured media at similar rates and, in turn, upwardly revise their assessments of the government. When participants are accurately informed about ownership, however, regime opponents become more likely to avoid captured outlets or resist their messaging, while supporters increase their consumption of these sources. Paradoxically, learning about the regime’s covert media control increases overall support for incumbent leaders, possibly because such control is perceived as a form of public good provision. These findings suggest that covert media capture enables autocrats to reach and persuade skeptical audiences, with minimal reputational costs if these tactics are exposed.

How does media access shape public opinion in autocracies? I explore this question using a field experiment in Tanzania in which participants were randomly assigned one month of free access to 30 newspapers via a mobile news app. The intervention led to a 52 percentage point increase in newspaper readership, with users preferring independent outlets to state-owned sources. In an endline survey, treated respondents scored significantly higher on a political knowledge index, displaying greater awareness of planned electoral reforms and key economic indicators. However, they also expressed more favorable attitudes toward the regime on average. This latter effect appears to be driven by the tendency of anti-regime participants to substitute newspapers for online sources, which tend to be more critical of the regime. The findings suggest that independent media can increase political knowledge in developing autocracies, but that among certain populations, it may paradoxically bolster support for the government.

This paper explores an increasingly prevalent tactic employed by autocrats seeking to control the media: temporarily suspending critical outlets. I argue that the threat of suspensions generates strong financial incentives for independent outlets to self-censor, causing their coverage to more closely resemble that of pro-government outlets. To test this argument, I leverage the 2019 suspension of The Citizen, Tanzania’s most prominent independent newspaper. Applying a difference-in-difference design to a corpus of 30,000 newspaper articles, I find that the suspension caused The Citizen to scale back criticism of the regime and increase positive coverage. I also document indirect chilling effects on other independent outlets. Finally, drawing upon unique data on Tanzanians’ daily media habits, I show that audiences did not respond to the suspension by curtailing their consumption of The Citizen or migrating to other sources. The results imply that the overall effect of the suspension was to shift Tanzanians’ media diets in a more pro-regime direction. 

Is narrative entertainment simply a form of recreation, or does it have meaningful effects on public opinion? Building on prior reviews, we present a meta-analysis of 377 findings from 77 experiments evaluating the persuasive effects of narrative radio, television, and film, including a growing body of work from low- and middle-income countries. Our sample includes both entertainment-first narratives — popular media created primarily to entertain but which may incidentally shape audiences’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors — and education-first narratives designed by policymakers to inform, persuade, or motivate public action. Using a hierarchical-effects model, we assess narrative media’s influence across a wide range of settings and issue domains. The results suggest that narrative entertainment is quite influential, with sizable persuasive effects that remain apparent weeks after initial exposure. A smaller literature reports head-to-head tests of the relative effectiveness of narrative versus non-narrative messages; although inconclusive, the evidence suggests that narratives may be only slightly more persuasive than non-narrative messages. If true, this finding would imply that the main advantage of narratives may be their ability to attract and engage large and diverse audiences. We conclude by calling attention to gaps in the literature and proposing avenues for further research.

Bardia Rahmani [first author], Donald P. Green, Dylan W. Groves, and Beatrice Montano

Early and forced marriage (EFM) is an increasing focus of international organizations and local non-government organizations. This study assesses the extent to which attitudes and norms related to EFM can be changed by locally tailored media campaigns. A two-hour radio drama set in rural Tanzania was presented to Tanzanian villagers as part of a placebo controlled experiment randomized at the village level. A random sample of 1,200 villagers was interviewed at baseline and invited to a presentation of the radio drama, 83% of whom attended. 95% of baseline respondents were reinterviewed two weeks later, and 97% fifteen months after that. The radio drama produced sizable and statistically significant effects on attitudes and perceived norms concerning forced marriage, which was the focus of the radio drama, as well as more general attitudes about gender equality. Fifteen months later, treatment effects diminished, but we continue to see evidence of EFM-related attitude change. 

Donald P. Green, Dylan W. Groves, Constantine Manda, Beatrice Montano, and Bardia Rahmani

Can media campaigns mobilize Africans to take political action on environmental issues? We report the results of a placebo-controlled experiment conducted in rural Tanzania in which 1,360 respondents from 34 villages were randomly assigned to attend a screening of a radio drama designed to generate political support for conservationism. The drama depicts a corrupt bargain between a business developer and a public official to exploit the natural resources of a local village; the hero of the story rallies voters to reject the deal in favor of environmental preservation. Outcomes were assessed through a survey conducted four weeks later. Participants who were randomly exposed to the drama became more knowledgeable about climate change, more likely to cite environmental protection as a political priority, and more supportive of pro-environmental policies and candidates. A year later, treatment effects remain detectable for certain measures but decay for others, highlighting the importance of sustained messaging. 

Bardia Rahmani [first author], Dylan W. Groves, Beatrice Montano, and Donald P. Green, Beatrice Montano

Can religious leaders use their standing to promote women's political participation (WPP) in the developing world? We present the results of experiments conducted in northeastern Tanzania that estimate the effect of a pro-WPP audio message from a progressive religious elite on behavioral intentions, attitudes, and norms relating to female office-seeking. Across two studies (N = 4,701), we find that the progressive religious elite's message makes villagers more likely on average to say they would encourage their daughter or niece to run for political office. These effects on behavioral intentions persisted a month later. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that the children of respondents who received the progressive elite's message became more interested in running for political office. By contrast, we find muted or inconsistent effects of the progressive message on attitudes and norms, and of conservative messages on all three outcomes. The results suggest that interventions that leverage local religious elites can effectively reduce familial gatekeeping of women's political participation in socially conservative communities.

Bardia Rahmani [first author], Dylan W. Groves, Beatrice Montano, and Francis Ngatigwa

A growing body of work finds that entertainment-education interventions can influence attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, but few studies consider their effects on audiences' policy priorities. We present results from a series of experiments conducted in Tanzania that estimate the impact of four radio dramas on audiences' prioritization of environmental protection, countering gender-based violence, reducing early and forced marriage, and improving access to HIV treatment. Interviewing listeners weeks after they were exposed to the drama, we measure their policy priorities in two ways.  First, we use a conjoint experiment to assess listeners' propensity to vote for hypothetical candidates running on different policy platforms, some of which coincide with the theme of the audio drama.  Second, we present listeners with a small set of cards, each of which represents a possible village goal (or problem), and invite them to sort the cards in order of their importance.  Three of the four dramas significantly increased listeners’ preference for hypothetical candidates promising to address the issue featured in the drama, and all four dramas elevated the perception that the issue represents a top priority for the community. Pooling across studies (N = 4,464), the average treatment effects of narrative messages on voting and prioritization are substantial and statistically significant. We use machine learning methods to investigate whether people with various background attributes -- age, education, gender, religion, and exposure to mass media -- respond differently to the dramas. Perhaps surprisingly, we find sizable effects of similar magnitude across an array of different respondent profiles. The results suggest that, like news from credible sources, narrative entertainment can influence which issues audiences take to be important.

Salma Emmanuel, Donald P. Green, Dylan W. Groves,  Constantine Manda, Beatrice Montano, Bardia Rahmani

Do constitutional court rulings shape social attitudes and perceived social norms? Rigorous evidence from outside of industrialized democracies is scarce. This paper evaluates the influence of a recent ruling by Tanzania's supreme court which held that laws permitting marriage for girls under the age of 18 are unconstitutional. We randomly assigned 1,950 respondents in rural Tanzania to hear a radio report about the ruling or to a control condition. Respondents who heard the report were 8 percentage points more likely to reject all forms of early marriage and 5.4 percentage points more likely to say they would report early marriage to authorities. However hearing the report did not influence perceptions of community norms or willingness to speak out against early marriage, and the persuasive effect of the report was attenuated when presented alongside a countervailing signal from Tanzania's Attorney General.

Salma Emmanuel, Dylan W. Groves, Constantine Manda, Donald P. Green, Beatrice Montano, Bardia Rahmani

Can edutainment sensitize listeners to the problem of gender-based violence (GBV) and build support for a collective response? While a robust literature focuses on the incidence of intimate partner violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, few studies consider the broader range of threats that women experience in public settings, such as harassment, sexual assault, and sexual violence. We study how edutainment shapes awareness, policy priorities, and preferred responses to these aspects of GBV through a placebo-controlled experiment randomized at the village level in rural Tanzania. A random sample of 1,250 villagers was interviewed at baseline and invited to one of two randomly assigned radio drama screenings, then interviewed again one month later.  The 90-minute radio drama that focuses on GBV both raises awareness about the risks women face in their daily lives and increases the importance that audiences accord to sexual violence as a community problem. Narrative mass media offers an effective and scalable means for spurring collective action responses to threats to women's safety in public spaces.

Beatrice Montano, Donald P. Green, Dylan W. Groves, and Bardia Rahmani