Media censorship under the threat of a protest

Abstract

In this thesis, we study, both theoretically and empirically, how polarization affects media freedom when the ruler faces a protest threat. The protest is modeled as a global game, and the ruler censors the media to thwart it, which is costly for the ruler. We show that under this setting, an increase in polarization leads to an increase in media censorship. Using two different measures of polar ization and protest data, we provide suggestive empirical evidence that validates the model’s main result.