Defending the watchdogs: How citizens and courts protect the press

Abstract

A free and independent press monitors government actions, broadcasts public grievances, and facilitates debate and dissent among citizens. Because of this, some executives run interference—censoring newspapers, harassing journalists, and shutting down media outlets—whereas other executives do not. What explains this variation? We argue that executives decide to repress or to respect the press based on the sanctions they anticipate from two important constituencies: courts and citizens. We expect that attacks are less likely when courts can make adverse rulings and when citizens can vote leaders out of office. In addition, we suggest that these constraints can function as substitutes; we anticipate the reductive effect of judicial independence wanes as the level of electoral democracy rises, making courts vital to protecting journalists in less democratic systems. We evaluate these expectations using panel data on executive branch attacks on the press in 175 countries, from 1949 to 2016, and find strong support.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge research support from the University of Houston (CLASS Dissertation Completion Fellowship), University of Southern California (Provost Fellowship in the Social Sciences), and William & Mary (Global Research Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowship). We thank Lydia Tiede, Ryan Kennedy, Elizabeth Stein, Eduardo Alemán, and Susan Achury for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We use the terms “journalists,” “the media,” and “the press” interchangeably.

2 We use the term “executive” to mean the executive branch of government that leads the country’s governance and is responsible for carrying out laws and implementing policy.

3 Reporters without Borders (2020) found a 13% decrease in its measure of media freedom worldwide since the media watchdog group began its current index in 2013, and Maerz et al. (2020) found autocracies in the majority of countries worldwide as of 2020, with attacks against the media as a key factor and becoming more severe.

4 Ours is a logic of consequences argument. Certainly, a logic of appropriateness may operate in some contexts, constraining leaders’ decisions to repress the media for reasons other than judicial and electoral sanctions. However, we are most interested in those political contexts in which a logic of appropriateness does not operate—that is, where democratic norms (among them prohibitions on repression) are not established.

5 See, for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the American and European human rights conventions.

6 Some scholars have considered the relationship between electoral democracy and judicial independence on personal freedom; that is, “the extent to which people can make the choices they want in personal and public life without being dominated by others” (Berggren & Gutmann, 2020, 166).

7 For this variable, data coverage begins in 1993 and concludes in 2016 with the rest of our data.

8 Van Dalen (2021) described this classic relationship first articulated by Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) and Cook (1998).

9 With the advent of new and social media, leaders have been able to bypass these conventional routes to bring messages directly to citizens and even a global audience (Van Dalen, 2021, p. 2715), although traditional mediums (especially television) remain an important conduit for leaders in some countries (IREX, 2021).

10 As an example, see Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) single-party dictatorship during much of the 20th century. Lawson (2002) described this relationship between the executive and media in Mexico as a “culture of collusion,” in which “physical repression, direct government ownership, and official punishment for receiving banned information were all rare” (pp. 26–28).

11 In this first articulation of our theory of the interaction of institutions that influence the likelihood of executive attacks on the media, we excluded the legislature. We did this first because executives and legislators in a multiplicity of systems around the world often represent the same ideological and partisan interests. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that the legislature is unlikely to provide a horizontal check on the executive. Put another way, the legislature’s preferences and actions are already reflected in executive decision making and policy. Relatedly, the legislature and its constituent members are not expected to be independent of the executive whereas judges are expected to be independent. For this reason, judges often have institutional powers and protections that legislators lack—for example, longer tenures—that make possible adverse rulings. In like manner, citizens are not obliged to the executive as legislators might be, and citizens can remove leaders through various means. Hence, our focus on judicial and electoral institutions. Of course, building on our work, scholars should consider the role and influence of legislatures.

12 Although we only discuss two such occurrences to save space, courts often get involved in press-related cases. Media watchdog groups like Freedom House, IFEX, Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders routinely report such cases salient to media freedom on their websites and in annual reports.

13 Examples include postpartition India, Jim Crow-era United States, apartheid South Africa, much of the United Arab Emirates’ history, and post-World War II Greece. See the Appendix (Section B, Supplementary Material) for further discussion.

14 We acknowledge that populist movements in some countries produce democratically elected leaders who position themselves against traditional media, who they sometimes characterize as “fake news media.” Leaders from these movements might attack the press, regardless of the level of democracy. Notwithstanding, these movements do not currently enjoy national majorities in most instances and they certainly do not enjoy a global majority.

15 Indirect censorship involves awarding of broadcast frequencies, withdrawal of financial support, influence over printing facilities and distribution networks, selected distribution of advertising, onerous registration requirements, prohibitive tariffs, and bribery.

16 Although we acknowledge that this control is related to the dependent variables, it remains an important inclusion to control for the general environment in which media function. In countries with a generally open environment and an established practice of criticizing government, executives may be less likely to perpetrate attacks against the media. Nevertheless, we ran models excluding this control and our inferences did not change. See Online Appendix.

17 In choosing the range to examine percent change, we opted for the first and third quartile to follow the precedent set in previous work (Solis & Antenangeli, 2017, pp. 1126–1127).

18 As a further check, we ran Models 1–4 using the same time period as the internet censorship models (Models 5–6) to ensure these results were not a function of this particular time period (1993–2016). Our inferences did not change when we ran the analysis on this truncated time period. See the Online Appendix for these confirmatory results.

19 We provide the Internet censorship figure in the Online Appendix. It shows judicial independence is statistically insignificant at all values of electoral democracy (Marshall and Jaggers, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1418060. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Jonathan A. Solis

Jonathan A. Solis is a senior research analyst at the AidData Research and Innovation Lab, Global Research Institute at William & Mary. His research primarily focuses on media freedom, democratization, and the physical integrity of journalists and media personnel.

Kelebogile Zvobgo

Kelebogile Zvobgo is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary, and founder and director of the International Justice Lab. Her research broadly engages questions on human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts.