Deliberately Incomplete Censorship
Abstract: The level of press freedom in non-democratic states is commonly interpreted as the outcome of a contest between a civil society pushing for greater press freedom and an authoritarian regime struggling to suppress all independent voices. This paper presents a formal model showing that significant press freedom may in fact be desirable to an authoritarian central government as a check on difficult-to-control local officials, and explores how this motivation is balanced against the potentially destabilizing effects of negative media reports. The model helps to explain why the Chinese Communist Party has permitted greater media freedom since the early 1990s despite its continued strength.
