Electoral fraud is a widespread phenomenon, especially outside the developed world. Despite abundant qualitative and anecdotal evidence on its existence from around the world, there is very limited quantitative evidence on the extent of electoral fraud. We exploit random assignment of...

Do new communication technologies, such as social media, alleviate the collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, led to more protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous...

Media freedom strongly inhibits corruption and promotes good governance, but what leads to media freedom? Do economic development and higher advertising revenues tend to make media outlets independent of political groups' influence? Using data on 19th century American newspapers, this paper...

How do the Internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political economy literature, focusing primarily on work that considers traits that distinguish the Internet and social media from traditional off-line media, such as low barriers to...

Im Jahr 2015 wurden drei hochrangige Politikagenden auf internationaler Ebene verabschiedet: die 2030-Agenda für nachhaltige Entwicklung mit 17 Zielen für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung (Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs), das Pariser Abkommen zum Klimaschutz und das Sendai-Rahmenwerk für...

This chapter overviews the empirical literature on the determinants and the consequences of media capture, i.e., the situation in which governments or other interest groups try to control the content of media outlets. We start by examining the evidence on the effect of media capture on the...