Censorship as Vulnerability: Regimes, Stability, and Information Control

• In Event: The Authoriarian Toolkit

Abstract

What factors shape governments’ strategies of information control? This paper investigates the political economic determinants of media censorship. Theoretically, we argue that two key parameters trigger the incentive of incumbent parties or leaders to censor the media: the political regime type and moments of general instability. We argue that hybrid regimes censor more compared to both consolidated democracies and autocracies, and that general instability challenges make governments assert themselves as monopolistic censors. We test these propositions on two original datasets that we constructed: a new cross-national dataset of around 9000 salient censorship events (2001-2015), and a crowd-sourced dataset of censorship events that took place in Turkey before and after the 2016 coup. Panel and diff-in-diff results support our theoretical expectations.

Authors

• Cristina Corduneanu-Huci, Central European University

• Alexander James Hamilton, University of Oxford