Description
Authoritarian regimes often instrumentalise threats from abroad in consolidating rule at home. Linking themes such as territorial integrity and cultural preservation to foreign aggressors enables repressive elites to claim that their continued tenure is rightful and necessary. Whereas leaders in all regime types amplify external threats to boost nationalist support and divert negative attention, authoritarians’ capture of state media institutions provides them with deeper, wider, and more engaging toolkits for doing so than democratic leaders. However, the predominant focus on rhetoric in political science studies of rally ‘round the flag efforts leaves video-based tools autocrats use to engage audiences in legitimizing their rule understudied. Our rally ‘round the screen approach thus seeks to audio-visualize political science analysis of such efforts by specifying the meaning-making and emotion-evoking functions of regime videos and studying them in practice. Examining the case of AKP-led Turkey, we construct an original dataset of all videos (n = 11,165) released by ruling party and state institutions’ YouTube channels from 2005–2022 and delimit a subset of all curated videos referencing foreign Others. We then use intertextual analysis to extract common themes present in constructing these Others as threats through constellations of storytelling, imagery, and sound effects.
