Media control as source of political power: The role of oligarchs in electoral authoritarian regimes

funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), grant No. PL 621/4-1
Duration: 2018 - 2021
Project team: Prof Heiko Pleines, Dr Esther Somfalvy
 

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In authoritarian regimes the manipulation of media reporting is one of the major battlegrounds for political power. Increasing authoritarian tendencies usually start with pressure on independent media and their owners, who in many cases are powerful business people. Often such business magnates (commonly referred to as “oligarchs” in the post-Soviet region) use their media assets to negotiate better deals with the ruling political elites in exchange for support of the government’s agenda by their media.

In this context, it is regularly assumed that media ownership gives direct control over media reporting. The research project tested this assumption for three countries (Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine) by examining the media and journalists as agents rather than mouthpieces of the owners. The central research questions were under which conditions journalists protest publicly against external pressure and what that means for media content and for political regime dynamics.

Due to the relatively large number of electoral authoritarian regimes with media-owning business tycoons, the post-Soviet region (with Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine as case countries) has been selected in a most similar cases-design. The project team did a large-scale content analysis of media reporting covering several thousand articles, conducted interviews with journalists from prominent national media, compiled protest event databases for the case countries to identify challenges to political power, coded the protest repertoire of journalists and conducted case studies of controversial ownership changes of media outlets. Within the limits of data protection and copyrights the data collections have been published with the Discuss Data online repositorium.

The project results suggest that the on-going trend to focus on the analysis of legitimation strategies which are employed by ruling political elites is adequate for stronger authoritarian countries (hegemonic authoritarian or closed authoritarian, depending on the terminology), like Kazakhstan or present-day Russia. For example, the qualitative content analysis of media reporting about protests in Kazakhstan reveals that there is a clear strategy to ignore smaller protests and to discredit larger protests as illegal hooliganism without quoting anyone close to the protest organisers or participants. This reporting gives the political leadership the chance to present itself as moderate and forgiving, without having to make political concessions. Even independent media and online media do not challenge this framing.

However, in the case of competitive authoritarian regimes, like Ukraine prior to the Euromaidan protests of 2013/14, journalists can play an important role in political regime dynamics. Their major contribution lies in the provision of alternative coverage of events, though some journalists also become influential members of a political counter-elite. In order to understand their role better, the perceptions and environments of journalists have to be examined closely. That is why the studies on the Ukrainian case form the project’s most important contribution to current research on authoritarian regimes.


Project workshop

Workshop "Media control as source of political power in Central and Eastern Europe” organized jointly with the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, 2 - 3 September 2019 (Programme)

A report on the workshop has been published on the blog of the Russian Media Lab Network.

Selected workshop papers have been published in a special issue of Media and Communication


Project publications

Pleines, Heiko / Somfalvy, Esther (2022): Protests by journalists in competitive authoritarian regimes: repertoire and impact in the case of Ukraine (2010-14), in: Democratization (online first), (open access)

Dovbysh, Olga / Somfalvy, Esther (2021): Understanding Media Control in the Digital Age, in: Media and Communication 9:4, 1-4, (open access)
 
Somfalvy, Esther / Pleines, Heiko (2021): The agency of journalists in competitive authoritarian regimes. A case study of Ukraine during the Yanukovich presidency, in: Media and Communication 9:4, 82-92 (open access)

Heinrich, Andreas / Pleines, Heiko (2021): Debates about export pipelines from the post-Soviet region: Opinion leaders and advocacy coalitions, in: Extractive Industries and Society, 8:4, online only

Somfalvy, Esther (2021): Schrumpfende Freiräume für Russlands Medien, in: Russland-Analysen 403, 25-27 (open access)

Pleines, Heiko (2020): Media Control as Source of Political Power: Differentiating Reach and Impact, in: Russian Analytical Digest 258, 2-7 (open access)
 
Somfalvy, Esther (2020): Shrinking Niches for Independent Journalism: the Case of Vedomosti in: Russian Analytical Digest 258, 8-11 (open access)

Pleines, Heiko (2019): The Political Role of Business Magnates in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 60:2, 299-334 (open access)

Pleines, Heiko (2019): Berichterstattung über öffentliche Proteste in Kasachstan. Medienkontrolle als Quelle politischer Macht, in: Zentralasien-Analysen 138, 2-11 (open access)

Pleines, Heiko (2019): Oligarchs and Political Regime Change. A Comparative Perspective, in: Russian Analytical Digest 233, pp. 2-4 (open access)