Sultanist and militarist soft propaganda, and support for security operations

Abstract

How does autocratic soft propaganda impact support for security operations at home and abroad? Autocratic regimes allocate significant resources for TV series and movies to manufacture public support and boost nationalism. Despite the growing scholarship, we still do not know enough about the effectiveness of soft propaganda. To that end, first, we scraped transcript data from 1,201 episodes across fourteen Turkish government- sponsored TV series over a decade (2014-2026) and 410 instrumental soundtracks data. The findings reveal a sophisticated, differentiated propaganda ecosystem where each series serves a distinct ideological function, evokes varying emotions, and closely correlates with contemporary events. Second, we conducted an in-person experiment in Turkey to measure the effects of government-funded militarist and imperial/neo- Ottomanist/sultanist TV series on support for cross-border military operations and domestic police operations. The findings suggest that we should take fiction seriously: imperial/neo-Ottomanist/sultanist TV series significantly increase support for scaling up security operations abroad among religious pro-regime voters, while militarist scripts drive similar attitudes among nationalists. Both scripts fuel anti-Israel sentiments among government supporters. The results show that autocrats cater soft propaganda to different ideological groups within their support base and to varying degrees of effectiveness.