Conflict, information and regime-change

We study the choice between media freedom and censorship by an autocratic regime whose power can be challenged by citizens’ riots. To mitigate the risk of revolts, the regime can reduce citizens’ discontent, which is unknown to all, through public goods provision. To fine-tune such provision, the regime needs reliable information about discontent. However, public information has the unintended effect of helping citizens to coordinate towards rioting. We find that, ex ante, media freedom is preferred by strong and weak regimes, whereas censorship is preferred by regimes of intermediate strength. We also show that, absent policy-making, all regimes would prefer censorship, implying that media freedom is important for the fine-tuning of public goods provision, and hence for building popular consensus.