(Political Science Research and Methods, 2015-12-02) Whitten-Woodring, Jenifer; Van Belle, Douglas A.
Media freedom has motivated substantial political activism, yet there are surprising gaps in the related academic literature, in part because of a lack of historic and consistent data. We introduce the newly expanded Global Media Freedom Dataset, which includes 196 countries from 1948 to 2012, and demonstrate how it can be used to test previous hypotheses and assumptions about the correlates of media freedom.