“When They Flex Muscles: Military Parade and Citizens’ Falsification in Political Expression” (manuscript)

Abstract: Military parades can inspire public support for the government, whereas they also signal the government’s repressive force and thus deter defiance, especially in autocracies. How do military parades affect citizens’ political expression? This paper proposes a strategy to examine falsification in closed autocracies by examining how citizens report factual political information. A quasi-experimental study using the Chinese General Social Survey shows that China’s 2015 Victory Day Parade significantly shifted respondents’ political expression, in terms of reporting more truthfully about their ties with the regime. The finding suggests that military parades signal the regime’s repressive force and remind citizens of the risk of falsifying regime ties. Moving beyond previous studies about how hard propaganda induces citizens’ preference falsification to feign political loyalty, this paper stresses that hard propaganda can also make people more truthful when they report factual political information.