Conflict, information and regime-change

Davide Bosco, Luca Colombo and Gianluca Femminis

European Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 89, issue C

Abstract: We study the choice between media freedom and censorship by an autocratic regime whose power can be challenged by citizens’ riots. To mitigate the risk of revolts, the regime can reduce citizens’ discontent, which is unknown to all, through public goods provision. To fine-tune such provision, the regime needs reliable information about discontent. However, public information has the unintended effect of helping citizens to coordinate towards rioting. We find that, ex ante, media freedom is preferred by strong and weak regimes, whereas censorship is preferred by regimes of intermediate strength. We also show that, absent policy-making, all regimes would prefer censorship, implying that media freedom is important for the fine-tuning of public goods provision, and hence for building popular consensus.

Keywords: Collective action; Global games; Information design; Media freedom; Regime change; Strategic complementarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D74 D82 D83 H89 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268025000412
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:89:y:2025:i:c:s0176268025000412

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102681

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 ().