Selective Control: The Political Economy of Censorship

Abstract

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 it and why? We argue that censors are more likely to target outlets and journalists that provide information to politically consequential audiences, while allowing media that caters to non-pivotal audiences to report more freely. In order to test our hypotheses, we built a new dataset of around 9,000 salient censorship events and their characteristics across 196 countries between 2001 and 2015. We find strong empirical support for media market segmentation. Outlets and journalists with wide audiences, collective action coverage and domestic ownership are significantly more at risk of severe censorship actions. We also find that audience pivotality matters more than the number and diversity of outlets for censors’ strategic calculus. Our results hold across democracies and non-democracies, for government and third-party censors alike.