State Censorship

Information Manipulation, Policy Reform and Authoritarian Survival

“…Nevertheless, in our model, as in Edmond (2013) and Huang (2014), we allow "soft information," information that is not verifiable by citizens, and consider the government's strategic choice of not only whether to disclose information but also how to disclose it. This paper also contributes to a growing literature on the relationship between government manipulation of information and citizens' collective action (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita 2010; Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2011;Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2011;Egorov and Sonin 2012;Little 2012;Edmond 2013;Lorentzen 2013;Casper and Tyson 2014;Dimitrov 2014;Gehlbach and Sonin 2014;Little 2014a;Little 2014b;Lorentzen 2014;Shadmehr 2014a;Shadmehr 2014b;Smith and Tyson 2014;Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2015a;Hollyer, Rosendorff and Vreeland 2015b;Little 2015;Lorentzen 2015;Rundlett and Svolik 2015;Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2015). Different from collective-action models based on (partially) common-value global games, our model is built upon the technics in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985), and assumes private and independent values among citizens.…”

“…Our paper is closely related to Besley and Prat (2006) and Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2015), in which the authors study how the government manipulates citizens' political actions through the media. Our model differs from their models in two aspects.…”

“…First, in our model, the government has an option to adjust the policy depending on cost that directly affects citizens' incentives in political actions, but there is no direct cost of lying. 4 Second, Besley and Prat (2006) and Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2015) focus on "hard information," information that is verifiable after being disclosed, and the government's decision is whether to truthfully disclose this piece of information. Nevertheless, in our model, as in Edmond (2013) and Huang (2014), we allow "soft information," information that is not verifiable by citizens, and consider the government's strategic choice of not only whether to disclose information but also how to disclose it.…”

Information Manipulation in Election Campaigns

“…Consequently, the models in Edmond (2013) and Ekmekci (2009) do not differentiate between strategic coordination failure and informational failure. In contrast, we analyze 5 The recent study by Shadmehr and Bernhardt (2015) on costly censorship of truthful information by a ruler could be interpreted as complementary to the study by Gul and Pesendorfer (2012). Shadmehr and Bernhardt found that the signal receiver's belief adjustment may lead to over-censoring by the ruler.…”

“… The recent study by Shadmehr and Bernhardt () on costly censorship of truthful information by a ruler could be interpreted as complementary to the study by Gul and Pesendorfer (). Shadmehr and Bernhardt found that the signal receiver's belief adjustment may lead to over‐censoring by the ruler.…”