“The Enemy of the People”: Populists and Press Freedom

• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912918824038
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912918824038

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(2) 261 –275

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912918824038

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Article

Introduction

Since his election as president of the United States,

Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the press, calling

journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on

earth” (Grynbaum 2017), claiming that he is in “a run-

ning war with the media” (Hirschfeld Davis and

Rosenberg 2017), and denouncing the press as “the

enemy of the people” (Remnick 2018). He has stated that

he intends to silence critics by opening up libel laws

(Gold 2016), while his erstwhile chief strategist, Steve

Bannon, went on record saying that the news media

“should keep its mouth shut” (Grynbaum 2017). Trump is

hardly alone. In fact, his actions with respect to press

freedom thus far have been mild in comparison with pop-

ulists elsewhere in the world. For example, in Venezuela,

in January 2010, President Hugo Chávez notably clamped

down on media outlets aligned with the opposition, shut-

ting down six television news stations, including Radio

Caracas Televisión (Minder 2010). In January 2018,

Rappler, the Philippines news website and one of the

harshest critics of President Rodrigo Duterte, had its cer-

tificate of incorporation revoked by the Securities and

Exchange Commission on legally dubious grounds and

has since been charged with tax evasion (BBC 2018).

Perhaps most egregiously, in Turkey, in the two weeks

following the failed July 15, 2016 coup, President Recep

Tayyip Erdoğan shut down more than 150 news outlets,

including forty-five newspapers, twenty-nine publishing

houses, twenty-three radio stations, sixteen TV stations,

fifteen magazines, and three news agencies (Mortimer

2016); tens or even hundreds of journalists remain in

prison (The New York Times 2018).

A growing body of cross-national comparative evi-

dence shows that populist rule is associated with

declines in institutional checks and balances on execu-

tive authority (Houle and Kenny 2018; Huber and

Schimpf 2016; Kenny 2017, ch. 2, Ruth 2018). However,

in spite of the media’s theorized importance in sustain-

ing a healthy democracy, and in spite of the threat that

populists appear to pose to press freedom from cases

such as those noted earlier, we still lack a specific theory

of why populist rule per se would be associated with an

erosion of media freedom, whether the relationship

between populist rule and press freedom might be con-

ditioned by the ideology of the populist government in

question, and a comprehensive empirical test of these

824038PRQXXX10.1177/1065912918824038Political Research QuarterlyKenny

research-article2019

1Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Paul D. Kenny, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian

National University, 130 Garran Road, Acton, ACT 2600, Australia.

Email: paul.kenny@anu.edu.au

“The Enemy of the People”:

Populists and Press Freedom

Paul D. Kenny1

Abstract

To what extent is populist rule associated with a decline in press freedom and freedom of expression? Populist

rule refers to government headed by charismatic leaders who seek to gain and retain power by mobilizing mass

constituencies that are typically free of other political attachments. Populism in this sense matters for two reasons:

(1) controlling the media is a core objective of populists compared with other types of political leaders, who can rely

on other organizational links to supporters; and (2) the interests of populist parties are virtually equivalent to the

interests of party leaders, which means that populists face different time horizons and constraints on their behavior

than the leaders of more deeply institutionalized parties. Using cross-national data on up to ninety-one countries from

1980 to 2014, this paper tests whether populist rule is associated with the erosion of press freedom and freedom of

expression relative to other types of government and whether any effect is conditional on the ideology of the populist

government in question. It finds that populist rule is associated with a decline in most measures of media freedom

relative to programmatic party rule. However, this effect is lessened for right-leaning populist governments.

Keywords

populism, press freedom, freedom of expression, political parties, ideology