Replication Data for: Illiberal Communication and Election Intervention During the Refugee Crisis in Germany

Populist discourse - which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties - has been on the rise in the world’s democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin- sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms though which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany’s elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 Federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.

民粹主义话语（populist discourse）——这类话语往往会惠及反体制政党（anti-systemic parties）——近年来在全球民主国家呈上升趋势。实力雄厚的非民主国家既有手段、也有动机向民主国家传播此类话语。本研究阐明了非自由民主国家（illiberal states）开展此类传播的动机，并厘清了这类政治传播如何将传统国家间宣传与选举干预（election interventions）融为一体。我们以克里姆林宫主导的德国难民问题相关传播案例为研究样本，阐明了该话语在目标国的运作机制。我们构建了包含超百万条新闻报道的语料库（corpus），以研判非自由民主话语的传播广度及其与德国选举的时间关联。我们证实，克里姆林宫通过发布远超德国本土媒体频次的难民相关报道，干预了2017年德国联邦大选。最后，我们探讨了将定向政治传播作为选举干预手段所带来的更广泛影响。