Over the Finnish Line. Understanding the Role of Foreign Media in the Democratic Transition in Soviet Estonia

• In Event: Media and Political Communication

Abstract

What is the impact of media on democratisation? With threats of democratic backsliding and the rise of cross-border media outlets sponsored by autocracies, this question has become increasingly relevant. Political scientists have long debated it, paying particular attention to independent foreign media in autocracies, which are expected to promote liberal attitudes and thus support democratisation. This paper provides novel evidence to the debate on this topic by exploiting a previously unstudied natural experiment setting, in which northern parts of Soviet Estonia were able to receive independent Finnish TV between 1971 and 1991. It uses original collection of archival data and post-independence election results to show that the municipalities quasi-randomly exposed to this alternative to the Soviet-sponsored media saw stronger pro-democratic attitudes. Already by the 1980’s, their share of membership in the Communist Party was lower than in the otherwise comparable regions. Results of the 1991 Independence Referendum from over 600 polling stations, compiled by the author, also demonstrate that the exposed municipalities were more likely to vote for the independence. Finally, the post-independence electoral turnout in those municipalities was up to 2-4 percentage points higher than elsewhere. Thus, the case of Finnish TV in Estonia validates the evidence from other contexts, most notably East Germany, suggesting that foreign media access in autocracies can foster pro-democratic attitudes, perhaps by making the viewers develop stronger aspirations to enjoy the democratic privileges that they were able to observe in other countries featuring on their TV screens.

Short Bio

I’m a PhD in Politics student at Oxford, where I work on historical political legacies using causal inference. Alongside the paper described above I study the effects of the ‘101st kilometre’ resettlement policy across the Soviet Union and the persistent impact of historical border changes on extremist political attitudes.
Prior to my PhD, I graduated with First Class Honours from BSc in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at UCL, submitting the final thesis on the topic of conflict escalation. Subsequently, I completed MPhil in Development Studies at Cambridge. For two years I also worked as a pre-doctoral researcher at the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation Unit, where I analysed the determinants of civil servants’ productivity across the globe, with a particular focus on Slovakia, Estonia, and Romania and co-authored four chapters for the “Government Analytics Handbook”

Author

• Robert Lipinski, University of Oxford