The paper argues that transformations in global media industry practices can be usefully indexed to the on-going trend to consolidation by ?big media?. This trend was influentially first described by Bagdikian who noted that 50 corporations in the US ?controlled more than half of all broadcast...

This paper explores the role of mass media in people's perceptions of charismatic leaders, focusing on the case of Junichiro Koizumi, Prime Minister of Japan from 2001 to 2006. Using survey data collected immediately after Koizumi's 2005 landslide electoral victory, this study empirically...

This paper studies the institutional design of newspaper and periodical wholesale. Motivated by recent developments in Germany, we compare the efficiency properties of two alternative regimes for determining the wholesale margins: collective bargaining (as practised in Germany for the last...

We suggest a model of electoral competition between two parties which is extended by a third player : mass media. The classical one-dimensional competition model is changed by introducing an issue-specific sensibility-coefficient and by allowing for non-voting. The winner is selected by majority...

The internet has transformed the way in which voters access and receive political information, such that it has circumvented the filtering of information previously undertaken by editorial offices. Consequently, consumers have had to learn how to filter relevant information themselves. The...

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). We study the role of social media in mobilization. In a simple model we assume that while social media allow to observe all previous decisions, mass media only give aggregate...