Sunlight Disinfects? Free Media in Weak Democracies

Leopoldo Fergusson, Juan Vargas and Mauricio A. Vela ()

No 10487, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak, and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in which politicians running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal that exposes these candidates increases their coercion effort to offset the negative popularity shock.This may result in the tainted politicians actually increasing their vote share. We provide empirical evidence from one recent episode in the political history of Colombia, the `parapolitics' scandal featuring politicians colluding with illegal armed paramilitary groups to obtain votes.We show that colluding candidates not only get more votes than their clean competitors, but also concentrate them in areas where coercion is more likely (namely, areas with more paramilitary presence, less state presence, and more judicial inefficiency). Harder to reconcile with other explanations and as a direct test of the effects of media exposure, we compare tainted candidates exposed before elections to those exposed after. We find that those exposed before elections get as many votes as those exposed once elected, but their electoral support is more strongly concentrated in places where coercion is more likely. Our results highlight the complementarity between different dimensions of democratic institutions.

Keywords: Media; Democracy; Elections; Colombia; Civil Conflict; Coercion. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 L82 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64
Date: 2013-02-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-lam and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8383/dcede2013-14.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Sunlight Disinfects? Free Media in Weak Democracies (2018)
Working Paper: Sunlight disinfects? Free media in weak democracies (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:010487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Universidad De Los Andes-Cede ().