Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:16:13.664Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2017

Stephen A. Meserve  and
Daniel Pemstein
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals’ access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 245 - 263
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Stephen A. Meserve is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University, 113 Holden Hall Boston & Akron Streets, Lubbock, TX 79409 ([email protected]), Daniel Pemstein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Political Science, North Dakota State University, 1661 12th Avenue North, Fargo, ND 58108 ([email protected]). The authors would like to thank seminar participants at Texas Tech University, the European Political Science Association conference, and the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science association, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Sivagaminathan Palani provided invaluable research assistance. The authors contributed equally to this work, which was supported, in part, by a Google Faculty Research Award. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2017.1

References

Abadie, Alberto, Diamond, Alexis, and Hainmueller, Jens. 2010. ‘Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program’. Journal of the American Statistical Association 105(490):493–505.Google Scholar
Abadie, Alberto, Diamond, Alexis, and Hainmueller, Jens. 2011. ‘Synth: An R Package for Synthetic Control Methods in Comparative Case Studies’. Journal of Statistical Software 42(13):1–17.Google Scholar
Adler, Julie. 2011. ‘The Public’s Burden in the Digital Age: Pressures on Intermediaries and the Privatization of Internet Censorship’. Journal of Law and Policy 20(1):231–266.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Peter. 2014. The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Barlow, John Perry. 1996. ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. Available at https://homes.eff.org/$/sim$barlow/Declaration-Final.html, accessed 5 April 2012.Google Scholar
Bawn, Kathleen, and Thies, Michael F.. 2003. ‘A Comparative Theory of Electoral Incentives: Representing the Unorganized Under PR, Plurality and Mixed-Member Electoral Systems’. Journal of Theoretical Politics 15(1):5–32.Google Scholar
Beck, Torsten, Clarke, George, Groff, Alberto, Keefer, Philip, and Walsh, Patrick. 2001. ‘New Tools in Comparative Political Economy’. World Bank Economic Review 15(1):165–176.Google Scholar
Bolker, Ben, Skaug, Hans, Magnusson, Arni, and Nielsen, Anders. 2012. ‘Getting Started with the glmmADMB Package’. Technical report. Available at http://glmmadmb.r-forge.r-project.org/glmmADMB.pdf, accessed 2 January 2012.Google Scholar
Bormann, Nils-Christian, and Golder, Matt. 2013. ‘Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2011’. Electoral Studies 32:360–369.Google Scholar
Boyle, James. 1997. ‘Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Censors’. University of Cincinnati Law Review 66:177–205.Google Scholar
Breindl, Yana. 2013. ‘Internet Content Regulation in Liberal Democracies: A Literature Review’. Available at http://www.gcdh.de/files/1113/6549/2342/YBreindl_Literature_Review_Mar2013_final.pdf, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Cameron, A. Colin, and Trivedi, Pravin K.. 2005. Microeconometrics: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carey, John M., and Shugart, Mathew Soberg. 1995. ‘Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral Formulas’. Electoral Studies 14(4):417–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chang, Eric C. C., Kayser, Mark Andreas, Linzer, Drew A., and Rogowski, Ronald. 2010. Electoral Systems and the Balance of Consumer-Producer Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Corke, Susan, Finkel, Andrew, Kramer, David J., Robbins, Carla Anne, and Schenkkan, Nate. 2014. ‘Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media and Power in Turkey’. Freedom House Special Report. Available at https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/democracy-crisis-corruption-media-and-power-turkey#.VXYCDc9VhBc, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Deibert, Ronald, Palfrey, John, Rohozinski, Rafal, and Zittrain, Jonathan. 2011. Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Deibert, Ronald, Palfrey, John, Rohozinski, Rafal, and Zittrain, Jonathan. 2008. Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
DeNardis, L. 2009. Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
DeNardis, Laura. 2012. ‘Hidden Levers of Internet Control’. Information, Communication and Society 15(5):720–738.Google Scholar
Dombey, Daniel, and Fielding-Smith, Abigail. 2012. ‘Analysts Link PKK Upsurge to Syrian War’. Financial Times. Available at http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dd2c9d8c-ec74-11e1-8e4a-00144feab49a.html#axzz3cflylwnP, accessed 10 June 2015.Google Scholar
Electronic Frontier Foundation. 2010. ‘Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA’. Available at https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca, accessed 14 November 2014.Google Scholar
Elmer-De Witt, Philip, Jackson, David S., and King, Wendy. December 6, 1993. ‘The First Nation in Cyberspace’. TIME Magazine. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979768,00.html, accessed 11 November 2015.Google Scholar
Espinel, Victoria A. 2012. ‘2011 U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Annual Report on Intellectual Property Enforcement’. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/IPEC/ipec_annual_2011_report.pdf, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Farrell, Henry. 2006. ‘REGULATING INFORMATION FLOWS: States, Private Actors, and E-Commerce’. Annual Review of Political Science 9(1):353–374.Google Scholar
Geist, Michael. 2003. ‘Cyberlaw 2.0’. Boston College Law Review 44:323–358.Google Scholar
Gerring, John. 2012. ‘Mere Description’. British Journal of Political Science 42(4):721–746.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, Jack, and Wu, Tim. 2006. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Google Incorporated. 2013. ‘Transparency Report’. Available at http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/, accessed 5 April 2013.Google Scholar
Google Incorporated. 2015. ‘Transparency Report: Explore Turkey Requests’. Available at http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/notes/?hl=en#authority=TR, accessed 9 June 2015.Google Scholar
Google Incorporated. 2016. ‘Transparency Report’. Available at https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/data/?hl=en, accessed 10 February 2016.Google Scholar
Grossman, Gene M., and Helpman, Elhanan. 2005. ‘A Protectionist Bias in Majoritarian Politics’. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(4):1239–1282.Google Scholar
Haufler, Virginia. 2001. Public Role for the Private Sector: Industry Self-Regulation in a Global Economy. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Gareth. 2009. ‘PKK: Breaking the Stalemate’. ISN Security Watch. Available at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?lang=en&id=100613. accessed 10 June 2015.Google Scholar
Johson, Joel W., and Wallack, Jessica S.. 2010. ‘Electoral Systems and the Personal Vote’. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/17901V1[Version], accessed 9 February 2014.Google Scholar
Kaufmann, Daniel, Kraay, Aart, and Mastruzzi, Massimo. 2010. ‘The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues’. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5430. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1682130.Google Scholar
Kaufmann, Daniel, Kraay, Aart, and Mastruzzi, Massimo. 2012. ‘World Governance Indicators’. Available at http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home. accessed 27 January 2013.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Pan, Jennifer, and Roberts, Margaret E.. 2013. ‘How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression’. American Political Science Review 107(2):326–343.Google Scholar
Lessig, Lawrence. 1999. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
MacKinnon, Rebecca. 2012. Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Magee, Stephen P., Brock, William A., and Young, Leslie. 1989. Black Hole Tarrifs and Endogenous Policy Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Marsden, Christopher T. 2011. Internet Co-Regulation: European Law, Regulatory Governance, and Legitimacy in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Merriam-Webster. 2014. ‘Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary’. Available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring, accessed 14 November, 2014.Google Scholar
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism. 2012. ‘Global Terrorism Database’. Available at http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd, accessed 6 February 2014.Google Scholar
National Counterterrorism Center. 2012. ‘Report on Terrorism 2011’. Available at https://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf, accessed 8 June 2015.Google Scholar
Newman, Abraham, and Zysman, John. 2004. ‘Transforming Politics in a Digital Era’. BRIE Working Paper No. 165. Berkeley, CA. Available at http://brie.berkeley.edu/publications/wp165.pdf, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Persson, Torsten, and Tabellini, Guido E.. 2005. The Economic Effects of Constitutions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
PKK Announces Ceasefire in Turkey . 2010. ‘Al Jazeera’. Available at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2010/08/2010814131932869254.html, accessed 10 June 2015.Google Scholar
Post, David, and Johnson, David. 1996. ‘Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace’. Stanford Law Review 48:1367.Google Scholar
Reidenberg, Joel. 1998. ‘Lex Informatica: The Formulation of Information Policy Through Technology’. Texas Law Review 76(3):553–584.Google Scholar
Rickard, Stephanie J. 2012. ‘Electoral Systems, Voters Interests and Geographic Dispersion’. British Journal of Political Science 42(4):855–877.Google Scholar
Rogowski, Ronald. 1989. Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rogowski, Ronald, and Kayser, Mark Andreas. 2002. ‘Majoritarian Electoral Systems and Consumer Power: Price-Level Evidence from the OECD Countries’. American Journal of Political Science 46:526–539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenau, James, and Singh, J. P.. 2002. Information Technologies and Global Politics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, Donald B. 1987. Multiple Imputation for Nonresponse in Surveys. New York: J. Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Samuels, David. 2001. ‘Incumbents and Challengers on a Level Playing Field: Assessing the Impact of Campaign Finance in Brazil’. The Journal of Politics 63(2):569–584.Google Scholar
Sell, Susan K. 1998. Power and Ideas: North-South Politics of Intellectual Property Antitrust. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
StatCounter. 2013. ‘StatCounter GlobalStats’. Available at http://gs.statcounter.com/, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Tonnelson, Alan. 2000. The Race to the Bottom. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
US Department of State. 2012. ‘Country Reports on Terrorism 2011: Turkey’. Available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/195768.pdf, accessed 8 June 2015.Google Scholar
The World Bank. 2013. ‘World Development Indicators’. Available at http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
World Intellectual Property Organization. 2013. ‘IP Statistics Data Center’. Available at http://ipstatsdb.wipo.org/ipstatv2/ipstats/patentsSearch, accessed 9 November 2015.Google Scholar
Zittrain, Jonathan. 2003. ‘Internet Points of Control’. Boston College Law Review 44:653–688.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Meserve and Pemstein supplementary material

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/Q0WIGS
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Meserve and Pemstein supplementary material

Appendix

Download Meserve and Pemstein supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 78.7 KB