Selective Control : The Political Economy of Censorship
In recent years, alongside democratic backsliding and security threats, censorship is increasingly used by governments and other societal actors to control the media. Who is likely to be affected by censorship and why? Does censorship as a form of...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/329391534428575999/Selective-control-the-political-economy-of-censorship http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30283 |
| Summary: | In recent years, alongside democratic
backsliding and security threats, censorship is increasingly
used by governments and other societal actors to control the
media. Who is likely to be affected by censorship and why?
Does censorship as a form of punishment coexist with or act
as a substitute for reward-based forms of media capture such
as market concentration or bribes? First, this argues that
censors employ censorship only toward certain targets that
provide information to politically consequential audiences,
while allowing media that caters to elite audiences to
report freely. Second, the paper hypothesizes that coercion
and inducements are substitutes, with censorship being
employed primarily when bribes and ownership fail to control
information. To test these hypotheses, a new data set was
built of 9,000 salient censorship events and their
characteristics across 196 countries between 2001 and 2015.
The study finds strong empirical support for the theory of
media market segmentation. |
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