Publication in Political Communication, 2026
Economic crises are widely understood to threaten the stability of authoritarian regimes. When citizens face rising prices, stagnant wages, and deteriorating living standards, governments come under pressure to demonstrate economic competence. Conventional wisdom holds that electoral autocrats are especially vulnerable: unable to suppress the daily reality of empty wallets and expensive supermarkets, they should lose their grip on popular legitimacy. Yet several prominent electoral autocrats have defied this expectation, surviving during deep domestic recessions. How?
The paper, “Propaganda during Economic Crises: Reference Point Adjustment in Economic News”, by Fatih Serkant Adıgüzel identifies a previously underexamined information management strategy: reference point adjustment. The strategy is grounded in the economic voting literature: citizens do not evaluate their government’s economic performance in absolute terms. Instead, they benchmark it against the performance of foreign economies.
Adiguzel, F. S. (2026). Propaganda during Economic Crises: Reference Point Adjustment in Economic News. Political Communication, 43(1), 149–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2025.2526387
When other countries are also faring badly, voters are less inclined to punish poor domestic outcomes. Pro-government media can exploit this cognitive mechanism deliberately by flooding the information environment with negative coverage of foreign economies. If audiences are led to believe that conditions abroad are even worse, the domestic situation appears comparatively tolerable. This distinguishes reference point adjustment as a subtle and difficult-to-detect manipulation of the comparison set that citizens use to form their judgements.
Media capture and VALPOP
The paper connects directly to VALPOP’s objectives in several important respects. VALPOP investigates how political actors in populist and backsliding democratic contexts shape public discourse around public goods, including through the distortion of information environments. This study provides precisely the kind of fine-grained empirical evidence that VALPOP’s research programme seeks to generate and interpret.
The finding that media capture enables the strategic manipulation of comparative reference points has direct implications for how citizens form economic evaluations, how democratic accountability erodes under electoral autocracy, and how computational text analysis can expose propaganda strategies that would otherwise remain invisible.
