Download This PaperThe Process of Democratic Breakdown: Controlling Information While Evading Term Limits
37 Pages Posted: 19 May 2020 Last revised: 13 Jul 2020
Date Written: July 12, 2020
Abstract
Politicians who erode democratic institutions to consolidate personal powers are expected to encounter opposition. The violation of fundamental constitutional arrangements such as term limits, so-called “bright line" institutions, should result, particularly, in anti-government movements. Empirically, however, we observe decreased rather than increased anti-government mobilization after term limit evasions. I argue that political leaders pre-empt protests during and after term limit evasions by limiting the free flow of information. Using difference-in-differences within a matched set that shares the history of treatments and a similar level of covariates, I show that term limit evasions are followed by a significant decrease in a country’s freedomof expression. In addition, using Venezuela as an example, I provide micro-evidence of information control by investigating how topics of opposition media change after term-limit evasion. Specifically, automated text analysis shows that a leader evading termlimits not only censors threatening political information but also induces the media to offer distracting and apolitical information.
Keywords: Term Limit Evasion, Democratic Breakdown, Authoritarianism, Self-Enforcing Democracy, Information Control
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