Essays in Political Communication during International Crises: The Case of the War in Ukraine

During international crises, people are exposed to competing narratives that shape their understanding of events, influence political attitudes, and affect how they seek and process information. Many studies assume that governments and media institutions control these narratives, shaping public opinion from the top down. This dissertation, however, contests that perspective by asserting that although states and media craft crisis narratives, audiences engage with and react to them through cognitive and emotional processes, impacting the ways in which information is disseminated and absorbed. By integrating findings from public diplomacy and political psychology, this research examines both how crisis narratives are created and how individuals respond to them in uncertain political environments, such as an international conflict. Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provides a crucial case study, as it not only triggered global economic and political upheaval but also generated competing strategic narratives. 

This dissertation consists of three articles. The first article builds a novel dataset of 125,000 Russian-language news articles and transcripts from state-affiliated media, systematically examining how Russian and Western outlets framed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (January 2022 – December 2023). Using computational text analysis,  I find that Russian media frame the war as a defensive struggle, while Western media emphasize humanitarian and political themes, portraying Russia as an aggressor. The second article builds on this analysis by examining how media narratives use anxiety and anger to shape audience perceptions and policy preferences, applying sentiment analysis to the same dataset. The third article tests whether anxiety changes how people seek and process information through a survey experiment in Kazakhstan (November–December 2024). Given its exposure to competing narratives and its geopolitical proximity to the conflict, Kazakhstan represents a particularly compelling context for studying these effects.  According to Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT), anxiety should lead individuals to seek out more information, engage with a broader range of sources, and reconsider their views.  However, my findings show no significant effect of anxiety on these behaviors, challenging AIT’s applicability beyond Western electoral settings.