This grant provided financial support for research on government-media relations and political accountability in democratic countries. The research contributes to a collaborative book project between the P.I. and Professor Elizabeth A. Stein, currently a postdoctoral scholar at the School of International and Global Studies at Indiana University (USA). The grant primarily funded travel for the primary investigator to spend one week at Indiana University for intensive writing and editing of the manuscript.

This research project fills a gap in scholarly understanding of democratic leaders’ incentives and abilities to constrain the media’s autonomy.  The media play a vital role in democratic accountability by monitoring politicians’ behavior and policy performance, informing citizens, and sanctioning the abuse of power through their reporting. However, in the many young democracies around the globe, the autonomy of the media remains vulnerable and various political, economic, and legal conditions limit the freedom of the media. Severe conflicts between political leaders and the media – so called “media wars” – threaten the viability of democracy in some countries. On both theoretical and empirical grounds, the book project challenges the conventional wisdom that democratic institutions and procedures guarantee media freedom.