The Breakdown of Peace: Mass Media and the Production of Domestic Soft Power
Abstract:
This project represents a new approach to understanding the relationship between mass communication and mass conflict. In it, I model the political economy of symbolic national attachments as a contest between competing political entrepreneurs seeking to mobilize followers across difficult social and geographic landscapes. By generating simulated outcomes across a wide spectrum of parameter values, the model demonstrates that robust empirical generalizations can be rigorously derived even in complex, dynamic environments. In particular, it predicts that under a wide range of underlying conditions, violent fragmentation will be less likely in countries with dense mass communication structures, as such structures generate greater opportunities for political entrepreneurs to successfully deploy inclusive mobilizational appeals on a national scale.
This framework thus endogenizes the emergence of intra-state security dilemmas, by describing the structural conditions under which divided group loyalties are more likely to emerge. It also overturns much of the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between media and collective violence by demonstrating that mass communication networks, which have frequently been blamed for stoking inter-group animosities, can actually serve as powerful forces for domestic peace and stability.
The book opens with a qualitative analysis of the media dynamics surrounding the unification and division of national communities in post-communist Romania and Yugoslavia. After developing a simple formal model of the incentives facing competing political entrepreneurs seeking to mobilize followers across difficult social and geographic landscapes, the predictions of the model are subjected to quantitative tests at three different levels of aggregation -- states, groups, and individuals -- on the basis of newly compiled data on mass media structures in 177 countries for the post-1945 period. The evidence indicates that dense mass media structures allow states to dramatically reduce their likelihood of large-scale civil conflict, that ethnic groups living in areas that are inaccessible to mass media technologies are substantially more likely to engage in violence against the state, and that individuals exposed to mass media messages are far more likely to express a willingness to fight and die for their country in the event of a war. By deriving and testing hypotheses at multiple levels of analysis, the project seeks to demonstrate that computational models, when grounded in analytic theory and empirical data, can help to build bridges across diverse areas of inquiry.
Chapter Summaries:
Chapter 1: Introduction
The book opens with a puzzle, drawn not from a remarkable instance of violence, but from a remarkable instance of peace. Following the withdrawal of Soviet military support, the Romanian regime seemed poised on the brink of collapse. Protests surrounding an arrested Hungarian priest should have represented a ripe opportunity for endangered elites to generate mass violence on the basis of divisive ethnic appeals directed against the Hungarian minority. However, while such appeals were attempted, they were largely ineffectual, and the regime was overthrown through a popular uprising which remained remarkably unified and peaceful. In contrast, a similarly positioned ethnic minority in post-Communist Yugoslavia, the Kosovar Albanians, became the basis upon which similarly positioned elites ignited a massive spiral of civil violence. While a number of theories purport to explain why divisive mobilizational appeals succeeded in Yugoslavia, they cannot explain why such appeals failed in Romania, which seems to possess many of the same conflict-inducing features identified as crucial by previous research? I argue that the key difference was the unusual density of mass media structures in Romania. Divisive mobilizational appeals failed in Romania because the presence of a remarkably broad media audience generated incentives for political entrepreneurs to compete on the basis of nationally inclusive mobilizational appeals. In contrast, the weak national media system in Yugoslavia created incentives for political entrepreneurs to mobilize followers on the basis of divisive ethnic appeals, generating a predictable spiral of mass violence.
Chapter 2: An Ecological Model of Political Fragmentation
A rich literature has considered the effects of polarized political cleavage structures on the likelihood of large-scale political violence. However, few attempts have been made to model the process by which group loyalties come to be divided and polarized in the first place. In this chapter, I develop an agent-based computational simulation of the emergence of polarized political cleavages. I argue that computational models, when grounded in analytic theory and empirical data, represent an enormously powerful tool for hypothesis generation, especially when faced with complex social systems. The model describes the political economy of symbolic national attachments as a contest between competing political entrepreneurs seeking to mobilize followers across difficult social and geographic landscapes. The model thus endogenizes the emergence of intra-state security dilemmas by describing the conditions under which the political pursuit of violent fragmentation is likely to succeed. The model also generates a number of observable implications concerning fragmentation, polarization, and conflict onset and duration. In particular, it predicts that under a wide range of underlying conditions, violent fragmentation will be less likely in countries with dense mass communication structures, as such structures generate greater opportunities for political entrepreneurs to successfully deploy inclusive mobilizational appeals on a national scale.
Chapter 3: Mass Media Density and the Emergence of Civil War
Scholars of civil conflict have long recognized the critical role played by state capacity. However, previous empirical investigations have generally focused on the coercive dimensions of state capacity, obscuring the critical role played by mobilization on the basis of voluntaristic appeals. In contrast, in this chapter I focus on a measure – mass media density – that can only enhance state capacity by strengthening the state's ability to communicate broadly. Defining media density as the per capita receivership rate of newspapers, radios, and televisions, I show that that since 1945 mass media technologies have exercised a profound influence over patterns of large-scale civil conflict. Countries with high levels of media density are over ten times less likely to experience the onset of civil war. Moreover, using a combination of Bayesian model averaging, non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, and a non-parametric estimator of causal mediation, I show that the pacifying effect of media density cannot be attributed to modernization, military capacity, or economic development, and in fact is one of the most robust relationships yet identified in the quantitative literature on civil conflict. I also test a number of additional observable implications, including differences in behavior between democratic and authoritarian regimes and differences in effects on secessionist and centrist conflicts. The results strongly confirm the central implication of the theoretical model, that dense mass media structures generate substantial barriers to the pursuit of violent fragmentation at the national level.
Chapter 4: Mass Media Reach and the Geography of Insurgency
This chapter expands the empirical analysis by increasing its resolution, moving away from country-level aggregates by reducing the unit of analysis to the level of particular ethnic groups. Using newly compiled data on the geographic location of politically relevant ethnic groups, and geo-coded indicators of mass media reach, I conduct a global disaggregated analysis of the relationship between state capacity and civil conflict onset at the level of specific rebel organizations and the ethnic groups from which they draw their support. The results reveal that groups living in peripheral regions with weak media accessibility face a dramatically heightened likelihood of violent conflict, while groups living in areas with high media accessibility are strongly pacified in their behavior towards the state. Further robustness checks indicate that this effect cannot be attributed to modernization, economic development, or military capacity, highlighting the need for civil conflict studies to move beyond the conceptualization of state strength as a purely coercive phenomenon.
Chapter 5: Mass Media Exposure and the Production of State Loyalty
In this chapter the unit of analysis is again shifted downward, to the level of individuals. I test further implications of the theory using national survey data from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries. The evidence indicates that the formation of symbolic attachments to the state and its associated national community is strongly influenced by mass media exposure. Controlling for a variety of potential confounders, individuals with greater exposure to mass media are dramatically more likely to indicate loyalty to the state, as measured by their willingness to fight and die for their country in the event of a war. However, the effect of media exposure also depends on the broader media environment in which those individuals are operating. Using a multi-level statistical specification that allows me to directly test for cross-level interaction effects between individual-level variables and country-level variables, I show that the loyalty-inducing effects of mass media exposure are far greater in countries with higher levels of mass media density. This is precisely the relationship predicted by the theoretical model: because media density tilts the playing field in favor of inclusive mobilizational appeals, individuals exposed to mass media messages in media-dense environments are more likely to be exposed to a appeals rooted in nationally inclusive principles and categories. As a result, media exposure is a more effective inculcator of state loyalties in media-dense countries.
Chapter 6: Conclusion
I conclude by briefly discussing the structural implications of the emerging dominance of non-territorial mass media technologies, such as satellite broadcasting and the internet. I argue that international relations theorists must seriously consider the likely changes in the nature of armed conflict in the 21st century that will be wrought by the increasing prominence of transnational mass audiences and transnational symbolic loyalties.
