Suchergebnisse

Media freedom strongly inhibits corruption and promotes good governance, but what leads to media freedom? Do economic development and higher advertising revenues tend to make media outlets independent of political groups' influence? Using data on nineteenth-century American newspapers, I show that places with higher advertising revenues were likelier to have newspapers that were independent of political parties. Similar results hold when local advertising rates are instrumented by regulations on outdoor advertising and newspaper distribution. In addition, newly created newspapers were more likely to enter the market as independents in places with higher advertising rates. I also exploit the precise timing of major changes in advertising rates to identify how advertising revenues affected the entry of new newspapers. Finally, I demonstrate that economic development, and concomitant higher advertising revenue, is not the only reason that an independent press expands; political factors also played a role.

The risk of political predation impedes the achievement of economic prosperity. In this study, we analyze how the risk of predation evolves in different political regimes. Formally, we look at the interaction between a government and citizens in which, in each period, the government has an option to predate. Citizens prefer governments that are competent and non‐predatory and strive to replace ones that are not. Regimes differ in the degree to which citizens can succeed in doing so. In pure democracies, citizens can displace incumbent governments; in pure autocracies, they cannot; and in intermediate cases, they can do so in probability. After economic downturns, the posterior probability that the government is competent and benevolent declines. According to the model, in intermediate regimes, but not in others, governments can separate by type. One implication, then, is that these regimes are politically and economically more volatile, with higher levels of variation in assessments of political risk and in economic performance. Another is that in such regimes, political leadership can make an economic difference. Empirically, we test our argument by measuring the impact of economic downturns on the perceived risk of political expropriation in different regime types, using as instruments the incidence of natural disasters and unexpected terms of trade shocks.

This paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only national TV channel independent from the government. It was available to three-quarters of Russia's population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic, conditional on observables. Independent TV decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8.9 percentage points, increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6.3 percentage points, and decreased turnout by 3.8 percentage points. The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent TV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections. (JEL D72, L82, P26)