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Media Openness, Democracy and Militarized Interstate Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2006

SEUNG-WHAN CHOI  and
PATRICK JAMES
SEUNG-WHAN CHOI
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
PATRICK JAMES
Affiliation:
School of International Relations, University of Southern California
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Abstract

Mass media play a central role in political life. Media not only transfer information; they also facilitate communication. These functions may ameliorate conflict, crisis and war in world politics. Accordingly, this study looks into the impact of media openness on international conflict. Based on a cross-sectional, time-series dataset for interstate dyads from 1950 to 1992, logistic regression analysis shows that an indicator of media openness has a strong dampening effect on Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) and fatal MIDs. Moreover, this connection is significant even in the presence of a composite indicator of democracy (that measures its institutional attributes using the Polity data), economic interdependence and joint membership in international organizations. The results suggest that the successful neo-Kantian triad is complemented effectively by the presence of media openness.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , pp. 23 - 46
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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