Three Techniques Of Political Propaganda

Although political propaganda was discontinued by the end of the 20th century, its effects are felt even today. Today, through social media and other platforms, this concept is camouflaged as persuasion or advertising.

What is political propaganda?

Political propaganda is a form of communication that is part of social and political systems. This concept has been widely studied throughout history. In order to understand the concept of political propaganda, we must first explain three basic criteria:

• Content: The propaganda content must be political. The message might seem non-political at first, but after paying a little more attention to it, we will find its political association.
• Control over the message: An important factor here is that the messenger has complete control over the message. This applies to both the production phase and the broadcast.

• Purpose: The purpose of the message is to promote the interests and ideas of the recipient. Meanwhile, the message is also intended to elicit a certain response in the audience with a predetermined purpose.

In this article , we’ll discuss just a few of the political propaganda techniques.

Labeling techniques

These techniques use some form of labeling as the primary tool. The idea is to use certain terms that have emotional or conceptual resonance to associate the message with positive or negative aspects. There are many ways to apply this technique in political propaganda:

• Use of negative labels: In this case, something is labeled negatively, despite the fact that there is not enough information to support this negative label. A clear example is calling a group of people “bad” just because they represent different ideas.
• Asymmetric definition: Here words are used in an ambiguous way to ensure that the audience receives a message that differs from reality. An example of this is when politicians say that the purpose of war is to achieve peace. From this we can infer that an ordinary citizen and a governing body do not define peace in the same way.
• Echo-generalization: the use of vague sentences that have a huge emotional charge. For example, when a politician promises to bring ‘big change’ to a country.

Association Techniques

The aim of these strategies is to get the recipients of the messages to associate the characteristics of one concept (positive or negative) with another concept that is initially neutral to the audience.

• Juxtaposition: associating independent ideas with each other by putting them together. This works even without implicitly relating the two ideas. For example: ‘person X is authoritative and person Y plays golf with person X every Thursday’. The aim here is to make person X seem just as authoritative as person Y.
• Virtual words: Using certain words that evoke positive emotions in the audience. An example of this is the use of words like ‘freedom’, ‘security’ and ‘truth’ in speeches.
• Ordinary people: Using images that people can identify with their daily lives, habits, and language to give them a sense of belonging. For example, the use of photos of middle-class young people in political advertisements.

Techniques based on source reliability

The main purpose of these techniques is to go back to a reliable source to validate an idea or message. Some examples of this are:

• Making up a meaning through secret sources: Using sources whose identity has never been revealed and which are always spoken of only in generalities, for example by stating that experts support the message without naming specific names. Anonymity is used to prevent a message from being withdrawn anywhere. An example of this is a message along the lines of ‘Sources confirm party X is being illegally funded’.

• Wise men cannot be mistaken: citing prestigious people who validate an idea or message. For example, ‘Person X said this… and if this person said it, no one can ignore it’.
• Condemning the source: Denouncing an idea by attacking only its source. A clear example of this is calling someone a liar to undermine their message. In philosophical circles this is known as an ‘argumentum ad hominem’.

Finally

In this article we have discussed only a few techniques of political propaganda. However, there are many more. It would be naive to think that these techniques of political propaganda have no effect on us.

It is therefore important to be able to recognize these techniques so that we can prevent political powers from using them to persuade us.