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Media Freedom and the Institutional Underpinnings of Political Knowledge*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2013

Martijn Schoonvelde
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Abstract

Recent empirical workin the study of political sophistication finds that citizens’ knowledge of politics is not only a function of their individual characteristics but also depends on the supply of information from their environment (the ‘information environment’). Yet this literature does not address the question of how the information environment may be shaped by institutional factors. This article aims to fill this void. It first argues that the relationship between a government and the media affects the information that is available to individual citizens. Using cross-national data, it then finds that less government interference with the media (1) positively affects political learning and (2) moderates the individual-level effect of education on learning.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 2014 , pp. 163 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2013 

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Footnotes

*Martijn Schoonvelde is Associate Research Fellow, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, United Kingdom (m.schoonvelde@exeter.ac.uk). He would like to thank Roland Kappe and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and the European Political Science Association as well as the political science graduate student colloquium at Stony Brook University.

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