“Everything for the Front, Everything for Victory”? Elite Incentives and Rhetorical Adaptation of Russia’s Members of Parliament on Social Media

How do authoritarian regimes that rely on the disengagement of their citizens adapt to the demands of a major international conflict, particularly in political communication? Instead of risking potential destabilization by exclusively turning to mobilizing messages, we propose that a more dynamic rhetorical adaptation will follow, with a mixture of mobilizing, legitimating, and co-opting messages in the state media and – hitherto underexplored subject of authoritarian propaganda – public communication of the rank-and-file elites during an armed conflict. We argue that such elites, while generally reflecting the official propaganda in speech, will, however, display less war-mobilizing messages if they are more distant from the autocrat’s agenda; there will also be agency loss due to electoral individual incentives. Drawing from an originally collected dataset of 144,567 social media posts by Russia’s members of parliament during the military conflict against Ukraine, 2022–23, and using word embeddings and topic classification methods, supplementing with alternative approaches and accounting for the audience, we find support for the argument that the social media posts by individual MPs reflect not only centrally directed messages but also their own political and electoral incentives. These findings illuminate how political communication mediates the effects of external conflict on authoritarian resilience, also contributing to the literatures on authoritarian parliaments and legitimation, as well as social media under autocracies.