Media freedom and democracy in the fight against corruption

Sambit Bhattacharyya and Roland Hodler

European Journal of Political Economy, 2015, vol. 39, issue C, 13-24

Abstract: Democratization and media freedom have been suggested as useful tools in the fight against political corruption, but so far their interplay in this fight has received scant attention. We present a game theoretic model which allows for varying quality of media freedom and democratic institutions. The model predicts, among others, that democratization and media freedom are complements in the fight against political corruption. We test our theoretical predictions using differences-in-differences estimations and panel data covering 129 countries from 1980 to 2007. We find evidence of causal effects of democratization and media freedom on corruption, and that the two are complements. Our main results hold after controlling for income, country fixed effects, and continent-specific time-varying shocks.

Keywords: Corruption; Media freedom; Democratization; Political institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268015000269
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:poleco:v:39:y:2015:i:c:p:13-24

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.03.004

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().