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Item News about her: The effects of media freedom and internet access on women's rights(Routledge, 2016-09-08) Whitten-Woodring, JeniferHuman rights organizations have long heralded media freedom as critical to holding government accountable and thereby improving a wide range of human rights. Similarly the Internet and social media are assumed to empower citizens by enabling them to document repression and thereby discourage future abuse. So what does this mean for women’s rights? I propose that, when it comes to women’s rights, the combination of media freedom and Internet access will make a difference and that the effect of media freedom will depend on Internet access. I test my hypotheses across countries and over time and find that the interaction of Internet access and media freedom has positive effects on women’s rights regardless of regime type.Item The Role of Media in the Repression-Protest Nexus: A Game-theoretic Model(Sage, 2015) Kim, HeeMin; Whitten-Woodring, Jenifer; James, PatrickIdealized independent media function as ‘‘watchdogs.’’ Indeed, human rights nongovernmental organizations have argued that media freedom will improve human rights. This makes sense intuitively, yet recent formal and empirical studies show that the effect of independent media varies across regime types. We explore the relationship among media, government, and citizen protest movements and employ a game-theoretic model to investigate how the equilibria vary depending on regime type and media independence. In terms of equilibrium, we find that media watchdogging is most active in autocracies (and not in democracies), especially when the government’s perceived capability to repress public protest is declining. Uncertainty about the government’s ability to repress plays a central role in accounting for the manifestation of media watchdogging in conjunction with public protest. Illustrations from Tunisia and North Korea are provided to highlight equilibria derived from the formal model that vary as a product of perceptions about the government’s ability to repress.Item Fourth Estate or Mouthpiece? A Formal Model of Media, Protest, and Government Repression(Routledge, 2012-04-26) Whitten-Woodring, Jenifer; James, PatrickNew media dramatically increase citizens’ access to information and decrease governments’ ability to control the flow of communication. Although human rights nongovernmental organizations have advocated that access to independent news media will improve government respect for human rights, recent empirical studies have shown this is not always the case. We posit that media independence and the presence or absence of democratic characteristics, in particular political competition, have substantial effects on government repression because these factors determine the degree to which the government is vulnerable to public pressures. The model developed here includes three equations that encompass the impact of interaction between and among the news media, citizens, and government. The first equation specifies the influences on the news media’s decision whether or not to perform a “watchdog” role regarding government repression. The second equation represents public reaction to the news media’s coverage of government repression (i.e., protest). Here access to news media via traditional and new media is an important factor. The third equation represents government repression. Solutions to the system of equations are derived for four scenarios (a) Democracy and media independence are both present, (b) democracy is present but media independence is absent, (c) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is present, and (d) democracy is absent (autocracy) and media independence is absent. We then consider interesting properties of the anticipated behavior from the government, media, and general public through case illustrations for the Netherlands and Myanmar/Burma.Item Watchdog or Lapdog? Media Freedom, Regime Type, and Government Respect for Human Rights(International Studies Quarterly, 2009) Whitten-Woodring, JeniferA main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to have government-controlled media, some democracies have government-controlled media, and some autocracies have free media. How this mismatch between regime type and media system influences government behavior is a puzzle worth exploring. One of the most widely criticized government behaviors is the violation of physical integrity rights. The question posed here is, how does media freedom affect government respect for these rights? In this article, I theorize that the relationship between media freedom and government respect for human rights differs, depending on the presence of democratic institutions. The findings support my premise. Specifically, the influence of media freedom on government respect for human rights is negative for the most autocratic regimes and positive for only the most democratic regimes.Item When the Fourth Estate Becomes a Fifth Column: The Effect of Media Freedom and Social Intolerance on Civil Conflict(The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2016) Hutchison, Marc L.; Schiano, Salvatore; Whitten-Woodring, JeniferMedia freedom is typically viewed as crucial to democracy and development. The idea is that independent news media will facilitate free and fair elections and shine a spotlight on corruption—thereby serving as a fourth estate. Yet political leaders often justify restricting media freedom on the grounds that irresponsible news coverage will incite political violence—potentially undermining government and in effect acting as a fifth column. So is media freedom a force for democracy or a source of civil conflict? We hypothesize that the effect of media freedom on civil conflict is conditioned by a country’s level of intolerance. Specifically, we predict when social intolerance is low, media freedom will discourage domestic conflict because the tone of the news coverage will reflect the level of tolerance and ameliorate any inflammatory coverage. In contrast, we predict that high levels of social intolerance will fuel and be fueled by inflammatory news coverage if the media are free, thereby promoting civil conflict. We test our hypotheses across countries and over time drawing from World Values and European Values Surveys and the Global Media Freedom Dataset and find that the combination of media freedom and high social intolerance is associated with increased civil conflict.Item The Correlates of Media Freedom: An Introduction of the Global Media Freedom Dataset(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.