Selective Control : The Political Economy of Censorship

Abstract

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.