Replication Data for: Can Authoritarian Electoral Propaganda Compete with the Opposition? Experimental Evidence from Russia

This dataset contains the replication files for Rochlitz, Schoors, and Zakharov, "Can Authoritarian Electoral Propaganda Compete with the Opposition? Experimental Evidence from Russia," forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science. The paper examines whether electoral propaganda can effectively mobilize voters in a digital authoritarian regime, exploiting the unexpected release of a pro-regime video about the president, Vladimir Putin, shortly before the 2018 Russian presidential election. The authors conducted a pre-registered two-wave telephone field experiment in six mid-sized Russian cities (Bryansk, Ivanovo, Kirov, Kursk, Tula, Tver) in which they randomly exposed respondents to either a pro-regime informational treatment or a viral anti-corruption video by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and measured self-reported voting behaviour after the election. The experimental evidence is complemented by a nationwide city-level analysis that instruments public interest in the propaganda video with election-week rainfall to estimate its causal effect on Putin's vote share. The deposit contains three analysis-ready Stata datasets — the survey experiment, a city-level nationwide cross-sectional panel, and a weekly trend of Yandex searches (17 weeks) — together with all do-files required to reproduce every table and figure in the published paper and its online appendix, a full codebook of variable definitions and sources, and a README with setup and software instructions. All data are anonymised and contain no personally identifiable information.