This study examines the role of the media in sustaining regime stability in an authoritarian context. The article engages the recent work on authoritarian resilience in comparative politics but goes beyond the standard focus on elections to other important institutions, such as the media and courts, that are used by authoritarian leaders to bolster legitimacy. The authors find that the Chinese media contribute to regime legitimacy and effective rule by propagandizing citizens’ experiences in the legal system. However, unlike the “mouthpieces” of earlier communist regimes, the marketized Chinese media provide more convincing and sophisticated messages that continue to accord with state censorship demands while satisfying readers’ interest in real-life stories and problems. The “positive propaganda” and the relative uniformity of information sources because of state censorship lead aggrieved citizens to the law as a realm for dispute resolution and rights protection. Statistical analysis of a randomly sampled survey conducted in four Chinese cities in 2005 demonstrates that exposure to media reporting about labor-law-related issues successfully promotes the image of a proworker bias in the law among citizens, thus encouraging them to participate in the legal system. The state is able to achieve its political goal because of the lack of conflicting sources of information and the lack of previous experience with the reformed legal system among citizens.

In most liberal democracies commercialized media is taken for granted, but in many authoritarian regimes the introduction of market forces in the media represents a radical break from the past with uncertain political and social implications. In Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, Daniela Stockmann argues that the consequences of media marketization depend on the institutional design of the state. In one-party regimes such as China, market-based media promote regime stability rather than destabilizing authoritarianism or bringing about democracy. By analyzing the Chinese media, Stockmann ties trends of market liberalism in China to other authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the post-Soviet region. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists and propaganda officials as well as more than 2000 newspaper articles, experiments and public opinion data sets, this book links censorship among journalists with patterns of media consumption and the media's effects on public opinion.

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The Chinese media have undergone commercial liberalization during the reform era. Interviews with media practitioners reveal that media reform has brought about three different types of newspapers that differ with respect to their degree of commercial liberalization. Based on a natural experiment during the anti-Japanese protests in Beijing in 2005, this article shows that urban residents found more strongly commercialized newspapers more persuasive than less commercialized newspapers. Provided that the state can enforce press restrictions when needed, commercial liberalization promotes the ability of the state to influence public opinion through the means of the news media.

Though Twitter research has proliferated, no standards for data collection have crystallized. When using keyword queries, the most common data sources-the Search and Streaming APIs-rarely return the full population of tweets, and scholars do not know whether their data constitute a representative sample. This paper seeks to provide the most comprehensive look to-date at the potential biases that may result. Employing data derived from four identical keyword queries to the Firehose (which provides the full population of tweets but is costprohibitive), Streaming, and Search APIs, we use Kendall's-tau and logit regression analyses to understand the differences in the datasets, including what user and content characteristics make a tweet more or less likely to appear in sampled results. We find that there are indeed systematic differences that are likely to bias scholars' findings in almost all datasets we examine, and we recommend significant caution in future Twitter research.