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ABSTRACT
Focused on democratic and hybrid regimes in sub-Saharan Africa, this article explores the factors and conditions that dissuade or restrain governments from clamping down on press freedoms. We suggest that governments might hesitate to interfere with the media for three reasons: they may face excessive political or legal costs for such interference; they might have limited options available to them to curtail media freedoms, and, finally, under some circumstances, governments may obtain a limited payoff from efforts to clamp down on the media. Consistent with anecdotal evidence that motivates some of our hypotheses, our findings suggest that strong media sectors within civil society encourage government respect for media freedoms. We also find that the rule of law is associated with more favourable climates for the media. This likely reflects the protection free media receive from independent judiciaries.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, April 3–6, 2013, in San Francisco, California. We especially thank Leonardo Arriola for his constructive comments provided at the convention. The authors gratefully acknowledge research assistance provided by Samantha Berthelette and Kara L'Italien. Peter VonDoepp also acknowledges research support provided by the Louis Rakin Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Peter VonDoepp is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on governance and democratization issues in Africa. He has published in the Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and a number of other journals.
Daniel J. Young is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. His interests include a variety of development issues in sub-Saharan Africa. He has published articles in the Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Journal of Democracy.
Notes
1. See, for example, the work of Gunther and Mughan, Democracy and the Media.
2. Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media,” 645–668.
3. Popescu, “State Censorship.”
4. Ross, The Oil Curse, 82.
5. Besley and Burgess, “Political Agency, Government Responsiveness and the Role of the Media,” 629–640.
6. One exception to this trend is research by Kellam and Stein, “Silencing Critics,” described below.
7. Van de Vliert, “Bullying the Media,” 351–376.
8. Dutta and Roy, “The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Press Freedom,” 239–257.
9. VonDoepp and Young, “Assaults on the Fourth Estate,” 36–51.
10. Vanberg, “Establishing Judicial Independence in West Germany,” 333–353.
11. Helmke, “Public Support and Judicial Crises in Latin America,” 397–411.
12. “Media Bill Withdrawn”; “Sweden Counsels Government on Press Freedom”; “EU Criticises Govt Ban on Mwananchi, Mtanzania.”
13. “Malawi Donors Continue Withholding Aid.”
14. Author interview with Zambian journalist, April 2011.
15. See Widner, Building the Rule of Law, 18 and 311.
16. Uhlin, “Which Civil Society Organizations Support What Aspects of Democracy?,” 271–295.
17. Tusalem, “A Boon or a Bane?,” 361–386.
18. Korpi, The Democratic Class Struggle.
19. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.
20. Matibini, The Struggle for Media Law Reforms in Zambia.
21. “GJA Condemns Sentencing of Former ‘Free Press’ Editor”; “1998: Media Under Siege.”
22. “Shocker from the Bench.”
23. Besley, Burgess, and Prat, “Mass Media and Political Accountability.”
24. Kapstein and Converse, The Fate of Young Democracies; Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies,” 5–20.
25. Kellam and Stein, “Silencing Critics.”
26. Matibini, The Struggle for Media Law Reforms in Zambia, 26.
27. See Media Institute of Southern Africa, “Court Grants BNL an Injunction to Continue Publishing the Weekend Times.”
28. See Media Legal Defense Initiative, “Uganda: Using the Law to Fight for Media Freedom.”
29. Note that while the rule of law works in similar fashion to executive constraints in terms of foreclosing options and raising costs, they are distinct both conceptually and as operationalized.
30. Englebert and Dunn, Inside African Politics, 252.
31. Dietrich and Wright, “Foreign Aid Allocation Tactics and Democratic Change in Africa,” 216–234.
32. Dutta and Roy, “The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Press Freedom,” 239–257.
33. Our focus on the African context also allowed us to exploit several data sources that exclusively target that region, including material from VonDoepp and Young, “Assaults on the Fourth Estate”, Hendrix and Salehyan, “Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD),” Africa Confidential, and the Afrobarometer.
34. Englebert and Dunn, Inside African Politics; Tripp, Museveni's Uganda.
35. We do not go back further than 2006 because data for several important independent variables are unavailable.
36. Given data problems, the smaller island republics of Cape Verde, Comoros, Seychelles and Sao Tome and Principe are not included in the analyses.
37. This includes data for one of our key variables of interest, Media Support Institutions, which is largely missing for 2007.
38. This obtains even in light of the fact that freedom of expression is one factor (among 25 total) considered in the Freedom in the World assessments.
39. See Freedom House, Freedom of the Press 2014.
40. A full description of the methodology can be found here: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press-2012/methodology
41. Stern and O'Brien, “Politics at the Boundary,” 174–198.
42. Concerns about endogeneity also emerged with respect to the Press Freedom Index provided by RSF. In addition, methodologies for the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) index have changed from year to year, making comparisons across time problematic. See Coron et al., “Applied Statistics Study of Reporters Without Borders’ Freedom of the Press Index,” for a review.
43. Another issue with regard to the Freedom House scores is that they do not allow us to differentiate among the varied ways that governments violate press freedoms, which themselves may come with different kinds of costs and be more or less efficacious under different circumstances. As a result we are unable to determine how different kinds of interference respond to different kinds of factors.
44. Data for 2010 are not available, but were calculated in this study as the average of mean years of schooling for 2009 and 2011.
45. For full details on the project's data, scope, and methodology see http://www.afrobarometer.org
47. Freedom House, Freedom in the World: 2008, 875.
48. Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media.”
49. Jensen and Wantchekon, “Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa,” 816–841.
50. Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media.”
51. Dutta and Roy, “The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Press Freedom.”
52. VonDoepp and Young, “Assaults on the Fourth Estate.”
53. For data on conflict onsets we used the PRIO data set (http://www.prio.no/Data/) and then reviewed Africa Confidential to check for additional conflicts. For coup plots we used the “Coups d'Etat Events, 1946–2010” data set, provided by the Center for Systemic Peace, then reviewed Economist Intelligence Unit and Africa Confidential to locate additional coup events. For public protests we used the Social Conflict in Africa database (SCAD) developed by Hendrix and Salehyan (http://www.strausscenter.org/scad.html), with additional reviews of Economist Intelligence Unit. For data on constitutional reform efforts we reviewed Africa Confidential. Finally, for presidential elections we simply included a dichotomous measure indicating whether or not a presidential election was held in the country during the year for which it is included in the data.
54. We report on the 0.1 level of significance (in addition to the 0.05 and 0.01) as our sample size is relatively small.
55. VonDoepp and Young, “Assaults on the Fourth Estate.”
56. These questions were asked in all rounds of the AB.
57. This question was asked in rounds 2 and 3 of the AB.
58. This question was asked in rounds 3 and 4 of the AB.
59. We also recognize the potential endogeneity between media consumption and free media, that is, that an increase in media freedoms may lead to an increase in consumption. Unfortunately, our ability to explore this in a systematic way is limited by data availability.
60. In the event that more precise measures of media pluralism were available (for example, number of outlets per capita) we might be able to test this proposition more directly. We have not found data sources to allow us to do this.
61. Prempeh, “Presidents Untamed,” 109–123.
62. Arriola, “Ethiopia.”
63. No reports were issued in 2011.
64. Langbein and Knack, “The Worldwide Governance Indicators,” 350–370.
65. Ibid., 364.