Media Freedom in the Shadow of a Coup

Raphael Boleslavsky, Mehdi Shadmehr and Konstantin Sonin

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2021, vol. 19, issue 3, 1782-1815

Abstract: Popular protests and palace coups are the two domestic threats to dictators. We show that free media, which informs citizens about their rulers, is a double-edged sword that alleviates one threat, but exacerbates the other. Informed citizens may protest against a ruler, but they may also protest to restore her after a palace coup. We develop a model in which citizens engage in a regime-change global game, and media freedom is a ruler’s instrument for Bayesian persuasion, used to manage the competing risks of coups and protests. A coup switches the status quo from being in the ruler’s favor to being against her. This introduces convexities in the ruler’s Bayesian persuasion problem, causing her to benefit from an informed citizenry. Rulers tolerate freer press when citizens are pessimistic about them, or coups signal information about them to citizens.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jeea/jvaa040 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Media Freedom in the Shadow of a Coup (2018)
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:oup:jeurec:v:19:y:2021:i:3:p:1782-1815.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Romain Wacziarg

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from European Economic Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().