Abstract
Research on mass media in authoritarian regimes focuses more on state mechanisms of control than on actual media reporting and on moments of crises much more than on times of stable functioning of the regime. In order to shed more light on the role of journalistic mass media in authoritarian regimes, this article deals with the actual limits of pluralism in media reporting regarding policy issues in ‘ordinary’ authoritarian politics. Looking at pluralism in sources (i.e., actors being quoted) and pluralism in opinion, the article also deals with the often assumed increasing degree of pluralism from TV over print media to the Internet. This study is based on a qualitative content analysis of media reporting on export pipelines in three post-Soviet authoritarian regimes (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan). The text corpus comprises 3,618 media reports from 38 different journalistic media outlets published between 1998 and 2011. Two major results of the study are, first, that concerning the degree of pluralism, the differences between types of media are country specific, and, second, that ‘limited pluralism’ seems to be a misnomer, as the political opposition—at least in our cases—regularly does not have a voice at all.
Highlights
Juan Linz has famously defined authoritarian regimes as ‘political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor intensive political mobilization, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or occasionally a small group exercises power within formally illdefined limits but quite predictable ones’ (Linz, 2000, p. 159)
While Linz originally developed a typology based on several qualitative aspects, including the social origin of the ruling elites, their guiding mentality and the development stage of the regime, newer typologies of authoritarian political regimes focus more exclusively on the degrees of pluralism or political competition, where the central distinction is between hybrid regimes and fully authoritarian regimes
A real opposition, i.e. politicians openly opposing the government, is only verifiable in Azerbaijan, where it accounts for 1% of all quotes
Summary
Juan Linz has famously defined authoritarian regimes as ‘political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor intensive political mobilization, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or occasionally a small group exercises power within formally illdefined limits but quite predictable ones’ (Linz, 2000, p. 159). Akhrarkhodjaeva (2017, summarized in Tables 2.5–2.7) has conducted a meta-analysis of political regime typologies and a dataset of electoral malpractice compiled by Sarah Birch, which—taken together—show that manipulation of mass media reporting is the second most common deviation from democratic standards in fully authoritarian regimes. In this view, there is no pluralism and those who are visible in media reporting represent the ruling elites. Looking at pluralism in mass media reporting, our analysis tests the hypothesis of an increasing degree of pluralism from TV over print media to the Internet (i.e., news websites in the case of journalistic mass media)
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