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Portraying Competence, Benevolence, or Party Loyalty? Political Propaganda and the Image-Building of Political Elites in China

Yan Yang & Zhusong Yang

Comparative Politics2025https://doi.org/10.5129/001041525x17380761641486article
ABDC A
Weight
0.50

Abstract

How do political elites in authoritarian regimes shape their public image? Drawing on a unique dataset covering official news releases of the daily public activities of all provincial party secretaries in China from 2016 to 2022, this study finds that authoritarian elites manipulate the propaganda apparatus to project various public images. Text analysis shows that provincial leaders employ a variety of themes and narratives to highlight their activities, resulting in four types of images: competence-oriented, benevolence-oriented, party-loyalty-oriented, and versatile. Case studies reveal how the configuration of conditions, such as the official’s age, professional background, political connections with the top leader, and the socioeconomic characteristics of their province, relate to their image-building strategies. The findings, which are supported by methods including topic modeling, machine learning, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, contribute to the literature on political propaganda by emphasizing the diversity of public images among senior political elites in non-democratic systems.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5129/001041525x17380761641486

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@article{yan2025,
  title        = {{Portraying Competence, Benevolence, or Party Loyalty? Political Propaganda and the Image-Building of Political Elites in China}},
  author       = {Yan Yang & Zhusong Yang},
  journal      = {Comparative Politics},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5129/001041525x17380761641486},
}

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Portraying Competence, Benevolence, or Party Loyalty? Political Propaganda and the Image-Building of Political Elites in China

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.