Buying State Power: How Elite-Led Propaganda Through Advertising Mechanisms is Connected to Democratic Weakening in Four Countries

Top-down information control through strategic executions of propaganda campaigns does not only occur in autocratic countries, as we show here, political elites and allies in weakening democracies engage in information manipulation and control tactics to attack existing pillars of democracy, such as the independent press and free and fair elections. We expand upon the scholarship of “competitive authoritarianism” by focusing on these actors’ resource weaponization and degrees of capture of both traditional and digital advertising mechanisms to spread propaganda in order to bolster and centralize their political power. To do so, we engage in an international comparative study of four countries considered competitive authoritarian regimes: Bolivia, Hungary, Tunisia, and Turkey. Thematic analysis of data collected in 60 in-depth interviews with media and political experts indicates that these political elites and their allies wield advertising resources as a means to spread pro-government propaganda and exact informational control in coordinated efforts across digital and traditional media realms. In the case studies, we examine here, we argue that actors use advertising to manipulate information spaces with the anti-democratic aim of attacking critical and dissenting voices to suppress political plurality and centralize a budding authoritative power.