When “Propaganda” Becomes the Argument

What 24 years of Romanian parliamentary debate can tell us about distrust, political boundaries, and the changing language of democratic conflict

In political debates, calling something “propaganda” sounds almost self-explanatory. Someone is lying, manipulating the public, distorting reality. Someone else points this out. End of story. But the more I looked at how politicians actually use the word, the less straightforward this seemed.

Take a simple political disagreement. One politician proposes a policy, another disagrees. In principle, the disagreement can remain about the policy itself: whether it works, whether the evidence behind it is convincing, whether its consequences are desirable. This way, you would think it could only generate debate and facilitate creative ideas about how to bridge ideas on the policy.

Calling the argument propaganda does something slightly different. It raises a more fundamental question: why should anyone listen to this person at all?

The accusation does not only challenge what is being said. It challenges the credibility of the person, institution, newspaper, television station, or political group saying it. That distinction became the starting point of my Bachelor’s thesis.

I analysed Romanian parliamentary debates between 2000 and 2024, looking specifically at instances in which politicians accused someone or something of propaganda. The dataset eventually contained 2,498 cases, collected from the Chamber of Deputies and Senate and analysed using a combination of computational content analysis, descriptive statistics and regression models.

What I initially expected was relatively intuitive: as Romanian democracy became more strained, this kind of rhetoric would become more frequent and more aggressive.

That is not quite what happened.

The surprising part was how little changed

Across almost a quarter of a century, the most consistent feature of propaganda accusations was delegitimization. In 2000-2014, around 81% of the accusations contained delegitimizing rhetoric. In 2015-2024, the figure was still 76.2%. Polarization, conspiracy rhetoric and scapegoating also remained surprisingly stable. Even an overall measure I constructed to capture the intensity of weaponized rhetoric showed essentially no difference between the earlier and later periods.

So the simple story political science could tell: democracy deteriorates, political rhetoric becomes steadily more extreme — does not fit very well.

Instead, accusations of propaganda seem to be a relatively permanent part of political conflict.

Politicians have been doing this for decades. Already in 2003, Romanian parliamentarians accused their opponents of building their own “propaganda institutions”, including newspapers, press agencies, radio stations and television channels. In another parliamentary intervention from the same year, public television itself was described as having become the government’s “propaganda machine.”

The language feels incredibly contemporary — or, side note, you could say that contemporary languages resembles the same conflicts of the past (maybe next analysis from my dataset?). The interesting question, then, is not simply whether politicians accuse others of propaganda more than before.

It is what those accusations are doing.

“Propaganda” turns disagreement into a question of legitimacy

One of the theoretical ideas I found most useful while writing the thesis came from speech-act theory.

The basic argument is quite intuitive: language does not merely describe reality. Sometimes saying something is itself an action. A judge pronouncing someone guilty does not merely describe that person as guilty. A person making a promise does not simply report that a promise exists. The words themselves perform something.

Political accusations can work in the same way. When a politician calls an opposing argument “propaganda”, they are not necessarily offering evidence that the argument is factually false. They are attempting to change its status within the debate. The speaker becomes someone whose claims can be dismissed in advance.

In that sense, propaganda accusations can move political conflict from: “Your argument is wrong.” to: “You are not a credible participant in this argument.”. The opponent has the same reasoning, thus turning democratic dialogue into the vicious cycle of calling others propagandists.

That shift matters.

Democratic politics obviously does not require politicians to trust one another. Conflict, criticism and accusations are normal parts of political competition. But democratic disagreement still depends on some possibility that competing claims can be evaluated as claims. Once political disagreement becomes primarily a struggle over who is fundamentally legitimate enough to speak, the structure of that disagreement changes. And that is exactly what appeared repeatedly in the parliamentary material. Across both periods, propaganda was rarely used as a neutral descriptive category. It operated much more often as a judgment about who should be trusted.

What did change: the target

The clearest quantitative change in the dataset concerned the media.

Anti-media rhetoric appeared in 7.4% of propaganda accusations before 2015 and 10.7% afterwards. In the regression model, the odds of a propaganda accusation containing an anti-media element were approximately 1.5 times higher in the later period.

The numbers themselves are not enormous. But the direction of change is important. Political distrust increasingly moves beyond individual political opponents and toward the information environment around them.

A rival party can be propagandistic. But so can public television. Journalists. News networks. Online media. International institutions. Eventually, entire systems through which citizens receive information can be framed as compromised.

A 2016 parliamentary intervention, for example, accused governing actors of trying to transform Romania’s public broadcaster, TVR, into a “propaganda platform”. More recent parliamentary exchanges contain the same basic logic in much shorter form: “stop promoting PSD propaganda”. The accusation does not necessarily ask the audience to reject one particular story. It can invite them to distrust the channel itself. And once the source of information becomes illegitimate, every future claim coming from it becomes easier to dismiss.

From opponents to systems

The qualitative change becomes even clearer when looking at who counts as the alleged propagandist.

Earlier accusations were often quite concrete.

The government. A political party. A newspaper. A television station.

In the later period, the object of distrust becomes much more diffuse.

Parliamentary speeches increasingly refer to “globalists”, foreign powers, ideological networks, media systems or vaguely defined international actors. One intervention from 2022, for example, claimed that “the globalists fuel the war […] with weapons and mass-media propaganda”. Another described propaganda as coming from “cultural marxism and various globalist mediums”. Whatever one thinks about the political positions involved, structurally these accusations are different from saying that Party X is lying about Policy Y. They describe a political world in which manipulation is systemic. The enemy is no longer necessarily one identifiable opponent. It may be an interconnected network of politicians, journalists, institutions, foreign actors and ideological groups.

This is where propaganda accusations become especially useful for political boundary-making. They help draw a line between an imagined trustworthy us and a deceptive them. That boundary can be partisan, but it can also be national: patriotic Romanians against hostile media, ordinary citizens against global elites, national sovereignty against foreign manipulation. The content changes, but the structure remains surprisingly similar.

Political crises do not create the rhetoric. They activate it

Another thing I found interesting was the timing. The pattern across the 24 years was not one of continuous escalation. Instead, accusations clustered around moments of heightened political conflict and uncertainty.

There were notable peaks around the financial crisis and electoral contestation of the late 2000s, the period of intense institutional and anti-corruption conflict around 2014–2016, and the geopolitical and informational tensions surrounding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

That suggests a slightly different relationship between political crisis and accusatory rhetoric. Crises do not necessarily invent a new political language. They provide conditions in which an already available language of distrust becomes particularly useful.

When political actors are fighting not only over policy but over institutions, national identity, foreign influence or the legitimacy of an entire political order, accusing opponents of being propagandists provides a shortcut. Rather than demonstrating that every individual claim is wrong, an actor can present the source itself as compromised.

Romania makes this word particularly interesting

There is also something specific about studying this in Romania. “Propaganda” is not a politically empty word in a post-communist society.

For decades, propaganda was associated with the state itself: controlled media, political education, official narratives and an authoritarian information environment. That history gives the term a resonance that words such as spin or bias simply do not carry in the same way.

Accusing someone of propaganda can therefore invoke more than ordinary dishonesty. It can associate an opponent with manipulation, illegitimate power and an entire historical model of political communication. And contemporary Romanian politics gives this dynamic an unusually visible stage.

The cancelled 2024 presidential election brought questions of manipulation, foreign influence and information integrity directly into the centre of national politics. Romanian authorities cited intelligence concerning election interference and campaign irregularities when the Constitutional Court annulled the election process; Russia denied involvement.

At the same time, competing political actors themselves described one another’s narratives as manipulation and propaganda. The fight was therefore not only over what was true, it was also over who had the authority to define truth in the first place.

The problem is not that politicians accuse each other

I do not think the conclusion should be that the word propaganda is somehow illegitimate. Propaganda exists. Political communication can be deliberately manipulative. Governments, parties, media organizations and foreign actors sometimes do coordinate deceptive information campaigns. Calling those practices out is necessary.

The problem begins when the accusation itself substitutes for argument. There is an important difference between: “This claim is misleading, and here is why.” and “This is propaganda, therefore it can be ignored.”

The second move is much easier. And politically, it may also be much more powerful.

My findings ultimately point less toward a dramatic rise in hostile rhetoric than toward something quieter: an expansion in the scope of distrust. The basic rhetorical tool has been present for decades. What changes is how far it reaches. From political opponents to journalists. From journalists to institutions. From institutions to international actors. And, eventually, from individual sources of information to the information environment itself.

That is why I think accusations of propaganda deserve more attention within research on disinformation and democratic backsliding.

We spend a great deal of time asking how propaganda spreads.

Perhaps we should also ask what happens when the accusation of propaganda spreads too.

Because once every opponent is a propagandist, every institution is captured, and every inconvenient source belongs to some hidden network, the problem is no longer simply disagreement over facts.

It becomes disagreement over whether there is anyone left whose facts can be trusted.