Christopher J. Coyne and Peter T. Leeson, Media, Development, and Institutional Change Cheltenham., UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009

摘要

Television viewers in Venezuela are accustomed to having their programming interrupted by Hugo Chavez, who regularly broadcasts whatever he feels like on every channel in the nation.1 To the American visitor, this seems like just one of the many disadvantageous consequences of living under a dictatorship. Conversely, the idea that media propaganda propagates dictatorial regimes has been cemented in the popular mind ever since the publication of George Orwell's 1984. Whichever way one looks at it, media and dictatorship are clearly linked. But is an unfree media a cause of unfree political institutions, or is it a consequence? In the latest entry in the New Thinking in Political Economy book series published by Edward Elgar Press, Christopher J. Coyne and Peter T. Leeson argue convincingly that the arrow of causation in fact runs both ways.