There are places in the world that appear to be democratizing.  Their governments claim to be working toward institutionalizing a free press.  But authoritarian control can still be imposed behind the curtain of make-believe.  Let me share a real-world example from a country that shall remain unnamed.

A colleague in international development, let’s call him Abdul Kanak, is originally from a self-professed newly-democratizing Asian country.  We met up for coffee recently, and he told me about how things really work in his country’s media sector.  Having worked as a journalist before moving to the United States, Abdul experienced firsthand how the government effectively controlled the mainstream news media and its coverage of political issues.  Two forces worked in tandem to create the conditions for control.  First, concentration of ownership among privately-owned news organizations.  Second, the placement of cronies in positions of influence within the newsroom. 

India’s 2005 Right to Information Act (RTIA) was described earlier on this blog by my colleague Darshana Patel, who saw first-hand some of the innovative efforts by district governments in the state of Maharashtra to implement the RTIA. She concludes her post with a caveat: legislation is important, but it is the actual use of it that leads to its effectiveness—and that use depends on public awareness.

This important point, among others, is discussed in detail by Alasdair Roberts of Suffolk University Law School in his informative paper, “A Great and Revolutionary Law? The First Four Years of India’s Right to Information Act.” The paper examines the progress to date in the implementation of the RTIA. Comprehensive and ambitious, the RTIA is hailed by enthusiasts as a legal measure with a “revolutionary” potential. However, the results of numerous studies including two recent large-scale assessments of the state of the RTIA reveal that the task of implementing the law is not without major challenges. According to Roberts, at the root of the difficulties are: “uneven public awareness, poor planning by public authorities, and bureaucratic indifference or hostility.” The first and third factors are the ones that I found more interesting for the purposes of this blog, and in this post I will focus on the issue of public awareness.

Economists dominate international development, and, in the case of the World Bank, well, that is an instance of full spectrum dominance. In an article in Public Choice (2010) 142:1-8, titled 'Persuasion, slack, and traps: how can economists change the world?', Bryan Caplan has some bad news as well as some good news.

The bad news is a restatement of the argument of his The Myth of the Rational Voter (Caplan 2007): "I argue that economically inefficient policies survive by popular demand. The public systematically misunderstands economics - and probably many other policy relevant subjects - leading voters to support policies contrary to their best interests. I also  maintain that the public's misconceptions are, in a sense, wilful. Most people embrace political and economic beliefs on the basis of their emotional appeal, not dispassionate analysis."

"It’s a structural flaw of any totalitarian regime that the more you prohibit things the more valuable they become – it’s a market thing. If information is rationed and filtered, it becomes very valuable. One single word becomes a weapon, because you are not supposed to say it." 

-- Vladimir Bukovsky (as quoted in Financial Times, January 15, 2010)