Media Control in Contemporary Autocratization: A Mechanism-Based Mapping of Legal, Economic, and Digital Domination

Abstract

Media control under contemporary autocratization extends beyond overt censorship, operating through legal regulation, economic dependence, and digital infrastructures. Yet, critical political economy, media-systems research, media-capture scholarship, and work on digital repression have largely theorized these forms within separate analytical domains. This article develops a structured conceptual synthesis rather than a primary-data comparative study, taking the mechanism, not the country, as its unit of analysis: twenty-three country-period illustrations across fourteen contexts show how mechanisms operate, not how often they occur. The mapping compares legal, economic, and digital mechanisms across three positions on the autocratization spectrum—democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism—in terms of instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form. The ordering is ideal-typical and directional, not a historical sequence: legal control from deterrent uncertainty to institutionalized exclusion; economic control from discretionary dependence to closed resource architectures; and digital control from visibility manipulation to pre-emptive governance. Because the three families operate through shared dependencies linking the executive, state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership, they are relationally connected rather than independent. The mapping offers journalism and media scholarship a comparative framework for analyzing how media actors’ resources, autonomy, and visibility are reorganized within formally plural media markets.

1. Introduction

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has confirmed early critiques that market liberalization and digitalization do not automatically safeguard democracy or media freedom (Curran, 2002; McChesney, 1999/2015). Recent scholarship uses the expression contemporary autocratization to describe current processes of democratic deterioration and authoritarian transformation (Balderacchi & Tomini, 2024; Cassani & Tomini, 2020; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). Used here as a periodizing expression rather than a distinct regime category, the term refers to processes characterized less by abrupt regime rupture than by gradual institutional deterioration, often while formal democratic institutions remain in place. In these processes, democratic institutions, legal procedures, market dependencies, and media infrastructures are instrumentalized to reproduce incumbent power (Bermeo, 2016; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). This transformation reshapes the forms that media control takes. It need not involve the formal suspension of media pluralism: outlets, owners, and journalists may remain in place while the resources, access, and visibility on which they depend are reorganized.

Comparative politics has examined competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky & Way, 2010) and electoral authoritarianism (Schedler, 2013); critical political economy has located constraints on media autonomy in ownership and market dependence (Golding & Murdock, 1974/1997), comparative media-systems research in political parallelism (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), and media-capture research in transactional exchange within state–capital relations (Besley & Prat, 2006). Work at their intersection has traced media–politics dependencies in transitional democracies (Voltmer, 2013), changing forms of media capture in increasingly digital media environments (Schiffrin, 2021), and repertoires of digital repression (Feldstein, 2021). Taken together, these strands address the three domains of media control—legal, economic, and digital—within distinct analytical frames. Yet, they have not been integrated into a mechanism-level account of how these forms of control differ as autocratization deepens: which instruments are used, whom they target, what their proximate effects are, and what institutional form they take.

This article addresses that gap by developing a mechanism-based mapping of media control across three analytical positions on the autocratization spectrum: democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism. These are treated not as regime types but as analytical placements, distinguished by the extent to which referee institutions are instrumentalized in favor of incumbents and by how far electoral competition retains genuine uncertainty. Within this analytical scope, the article asks a single question:

RQ: How do legal, economic, and digital mechanisms of media control differ across the three positions of the autocratization spectrum in terms of their instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form?

Building on these studies, the article develops three analytical propositions. First, as autocratization deepens, legal, economic, and digital mechanisms of media control tend to assume more continuous, encompassing, and pre-emptive institutional forms while differing in their instruments, targets, and proximate effects. Second, because these mechanisms operate through shared dependencies linking the political executive, the state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership networks, they are relationally connected rather than independent, so that control exercised in one institutional domain may bear on the resources available in another. Third, mechanisms operating through legality, market transactions, and routine administration are more readily defended as legitimate intervention, while politically organized market dependencies can also be misrecognized as ordinary commercial relations.

The unit of analysis is accordingly the mechanism rather than the country. The study is a conceptual synthesis at the intersection of comparative politics and critical political economy of communication rather than a comparative case study built on primary data: twenty-three country-period illustrations across fourteen national contexts are used to show how mechanisms operate, not to measure how often they occur. Mechanisms are grouped into legal, economic, and digital families according to the institutional domain in which control is exercised and compared within each family on the four dimensions named above. Table 1 summarizes the resulting mapping: a three-by-three matrix in which each cell names the dominant institutional form of control and links its instruments to their proximate effects. For journalism and media research, this yields a comparative framework centered on mechanisms rather than media-system types: recurring instruments can be traced across positions, while mechanisms are compared in terms of their targets, proximate effects, and institutional form. The article next establishes the conceptual and analytical framework, defines the spectrum and its actors, maps the three mechanism families, and returns to these propositions in the discussion and conclusion.

Table 1. Mechanisms of media control across the autocratization spectrum.

Autocratization Spectrum: Ideal-Typical Ordering of Dominant Institutional Forms →
Control Dimension	1. Democratic Backsliding (Dominant Forms)	2. Competitive Authoritarianism (Intensifying Forms)	3. Hegemonic Electoral Authoritarianism (Institutionalized Forms)
Legal Legal formality and regulatory intervention	Deterrent legal uncertainty and institutional erosion SLAPPs and protracted proceedings → legal exposure and self-censorship Tax penalties and administrative sanctions → financial exposure of critical outlets Expanded executive appointment powers in regulators and public broadcasters → capture of public broadcasting	Selective legal weaponization Discriminatory enforcement of existing laws → legal exposure concentrated on opposition outlets Vague-law criminalization of journalistic activity → constant judicial threat to independent media Tax, debt-enforcement, and licensing pressure on critical owners → financial exposure and pressure to divest	Institutionalized pre-emptive exclusion Standing terrorism, foreign-agent, and disinformation statutes → continuous legal exposure License revocation and institutional liquidation → removal of outlets from the field Regulatory barriers to entry → restricted entry by alternative media
Economic Market structures, financing, and ownership control	Discretionary financial dependence Clientelistic tenders and public loans → financial dependence of pro-incumbent outlets Discretionary state advertising → covert subsidy and soft-censorship pressure Politically steered private-sector advertising → revenue deprivation of critical outlets	Coercive ownership realignment Accumulated fiscal and regulatory pressure → forced sale by critical owners Public-bank financing of aligned acquisitions → ownership transferred to pro-incumbent actors Owners’ cross-sector interests and access to public tenders → owner-imposed editorial restraint	Closed resource and infrastructural architecture State-directed financing and advertising allocation → ownership and revenue concentrated under regime-loyal actors Currency and newsprint allocation controls → constrained access to essential inputs State-controlled printing and distribution → blocked domestic production and circulation
Digital Infrastructure, platform, data, and algorithmic control	Visibility manipulation Bots and fake accounts → opposition information buried in noise and fabricated content Coordinated human intervention → disrupted visibility of critical content Automated astroturfing and coordinated discrediting → undermined credibility and pressure to withdraw	Targeted surveillance and infrastructural intervention AI-based classification and facial-recognition surveillance → identification of opposition actors and network ties Commercial spyware and targeted hacking → weakened protection of journalistic sources Throttling and DDoS takedowns → impeded access and disrupted coordination	Integrated regime-centered governance architecture Foreign-platform restrictions, platform obligations, and data localization → communication bound to incumbent oversight Software filtering → collective-action content suppressed, everyday grievances permitted AI and big-data integration → potential mobilization identified and opposition activity constrained pre-emptively

Note: The banner arrow (→) indicates an ideal-typical ordering of dominant institutional forms as increasingly continuous, encompassing, and pre-emptive across the autocratization spectrum. It is not an ordinal scale, nor an independently estimated relationship between regime position and the prevalence or intensity of media control. Each cell names a dominant institutional form; within cells, arrows link instruments to their proximate effects; mechanisms may overlap, accumulate, and operate across positions with varying intensity and targets. Countries may therefore display hybrid combinations; the table is an analytical mapping and comparison tool, not a regime classification. Source: Compiled by the author from the legal, economic, and digital mechanisms discussed in the text. Abbreviations: AI, artificial intelligence; DDoS, distributed denial-of-service; SLAPPs, strategic lawsuits against public participation.

2. Conceptual Foundations of Media Control

Contemporary media control cannot be conceptualized through state censorship alone, yet normative press theory long supplied the terms in which it was. Its authoritarian model casts media as instruments of state policy and legitimizes censorship in the name of political order, treating publishing as a state-granted privilege (Siebert et al., 1956/1984). Its Social Responsibility counterpart (Siebert et al., 1956/1984) makes government the “residuary legatee of responsibility for an adequate press performance” (Hocking, 1947, p. 182), a formulation that leaves the threshold of inadequacy operationally unspecified and the scope of legitimate intervention only loosely delimited, an opening Merrill (1974/1990) identified as incipient authoritarianism.

Critical political economy supplied the structural foundation missing from normative press theories by locating constraints on media autonomy in ownership, financing, and distribution. Golding and Murdock (1974/1997) showed how the commercial organization of media, high entry costs, and ownership concentration exclude economically weak voices; Bagdikian (1983) traced the anti-democratic effects of concentrated corporate ownership, while Herman and Chomsky (1988) modeled how news production aligns with dominant political–economic interests. Rejecting the liberal assumption that free markets secure a free press, this tradition located domination within market organization itself, an emphasis retained in Kaitatzi-Whitlock’s (2011) account of market censorship. Its structural-dependence assumption therefore treats ownership, advertising, and financing not as neutral commercial arrangements but as relations of dependence, though the tradition has also been criticized for underplaying political-institutional variation (Curran, 2004). At the transnational level, the same concern with structurally organized dependence recurs in critiques of the free-flow doctrine, which exposed asymmetries in communication flows and defended cultural autonomy against external domination (Hamelink, 1988/1997; Mattelart, 1979; Schiller, 1976).

Comparative media-systems research supplied the institutional dimension that political economy left underdeveloped. Hallin and Mancini (2004) systematized comparison through media-market development, political parallelism, professionalization, and the role of the state, while Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002) showed how instrumentalization and clientelism—informal dependencies between media owners and political elites—erode media autonomy. These dimensions were nonetheless developed from Western democracies, and political parallelism in particular does not apply easily beyond the Western world (de Albuquerque, 2013)—a limitation that bears directly on autocratizing contexts.

Media-capture research narrowed the focus to the transactional core of such dependencies. Besley and Prat (2006) model capture as an exchange between incumbents and media owners, while case research in post-communist and transitional settings locates it in institutionalized clientelism and path-dependent state–capital entanglement inherited from authoritarian legacies rather than in discrete transactions (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013; Voltmer, 2013). Ownership itself becomes the object of analysis: oligarchic owners use media assets to generate political influence and protect commercial interests in other sectors (Schiffrin, 2021; Štětka, 2015). Capture research has also produced explicit typologies of capture forms (Stiglitz, 2017) and of regulatory, public-service, financing, and ownership mechanisms (Dragomir, 2019, 2026). Dragomir’s typology is used to gauge the intensity of capture in a national context and, in its latest formulation, to compare distinct capture models and examine how these mechanisms accumulate sequentially. These typologies organize capture in terms of forms or constituent mechanisms, with comparison centered on national configurations and capture models rather than on positions along an autocratization spectrum.

Each tradition supplies part of what a mechanism-based account requires: the state’s regulatory reach, structural dependence in markets, institutional variation, and capture. Research on digital repression adds the digital dimension, documenting surveillance, censorship, shutdowns, and information manipulation as a cross-regime repertoire (Feldstein, 2021). For the present synthesis, Glasius’s (2018, 2023) shift from regime labels to authoritarian practices provides the bridge to mechanism-level comparison: it directs attention to practices that sabotage accountability by restricting access to information or voice across contexts. These studies have developed, however, around distinct objects—regulation, markets, institutions, transactions, and digital technologies—so that legal, economic, and digital control have tended to be theorized within separate domains rather than compared as mechanisms that vary in their instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form as autocratization deepens.

3. Analytical Strategy and Case Use

This article develops a structured conceptual synthesis of media control across autocratization. It does not compare countries as bounded cases, test hypotheses, or estimate causal effects. Its contribution is a mechanism-based mapping of legal, economic, and digital control, summarized in Table 1.

3.1. Synthesis Procedure

The unit of analysis is the mechanism, not the country: building on the practice perspective set out above (Glasius, 2018), what recurs across contexts is the practice rather than the category in which it is observed. A media-control mechanism is understood here as a recurrent process in which state actors or networks tied to incumbent power deploy a legal, economic, or digital instrument to alter media actors’ resources, incentives, access, visibility, or organizational capacity. A mechanism entered the map when it recurred across institutional settings, was documented in the literature, was exercised by state actors or by networks tied to incumbent power, and operated as a distinct process rather than a general condition.

The synthesis proceeded through three analytical steps. First, documented country-period interventions meeting these criteria were abstracted as recurrent mechanisms. Second, classifications in the source literature were not adopted at face value: documented processes were recoded through four common dimensions—instrument, target, proximate effect, and institutional form. Practices described under different labels were aligned where they were functionally equivalent, while similarly labeled practices were kept separate where their operative logic differed. Third, mechanisms within each family and analytical position were compared to identify the higher-order institutional forms reported in Table 1. These forms—including categories such as coercive ownership realignment—are therefore products of the present synthesis rather than categories imported from any single source taxonomy.

What is taken from the literature and what is added by the present synthesis can be distinguished explicitly. The concepts used to define the three positions, namely democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, together with media capture, digital repression, and the mechanism-level concepts attributed when they are used in Section 5, are drawn from existing studies; the positions are used here as analytical placements rather than fixed regime types. The relational vocabulary of structural dependence and the power bloc is likewise drawn from critical political economy. The synthesis adds the analytical arrangement of these positions on a single spectrum, the four-dimensional recoding described above, and the comparison of legal, economic, and digital mechanisms within each family and analytical position.

The division into legal, economic, and digital families follows the institutional domain in which control is exercised rather than any regime typology. Where an instrument spans more than one domain, the mechanism is assigned to the domain of the apparatus or infrastructure through which control primarily operates rather than to the legal form that authorizes it.

3.2. Sources and Selection

The source base was developed purposively rather than through a systematic literature review. It began from anchor works across interlocking studies on autocratization and hybrid regimes, critical political economy and comparative media systems, media capture, and digital repression and platform governance, and it was expanded iteratively through citation tracing. The conceptual framework is anchored primarily in the scholarly academic literature, including journal articles, research monographs, and edited volumes. Mechanism documentation draws on this scholarship and, where they provide specific and traceable evidence, on selected institutional and research sources, including reports from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Freedom House, Brookings, the Media Development Investment Fund, and the Media and Journalism Research Center, as well as selected working papers.

Country-period illustrations were selected purposively where the documented intervention made a recurrent mechanism particularly legible and traceable to its source. They were not selected to complete a predetermined set or to balance the nine cells. Country-period placement performs a separate evidentiary function: it draws on comparative regime and autocratization scholarship and, where relevant, V-Dem evidence, as set out below. The source base used for the synthesis was English-language; this language boundary is treated as a limitation rather than as a claim to exhaustive coverage.

3.3. Scope and Comparability

The mapping draws on twenty-three country-period illustrations across fourteen national contexts, listed with their sources and the basis of each placement in Table S1. They span multiple regions but are not a sample and support no claim to representativeness. Illustration density is uneven across cells, and some Table 1 configurations rest on the wider literature rather than on a position-specific case in the Supplementary Materials; this reflects the coverage of that literature rather than a claim that the configurations are rare. They illustrate how a mechanism works; they do not establish its prevalence.

Its temporal reference point is the third wave that Lührmann and Lindberg (2019) date from after 1993. This frame does not itself determine analytical placement: country-periods are assigned to positions by the institutional criteria specified below rather than by calendar date alone.

Placements are assigned to country-periods, rather than to countries as fixed units, based on three criteria: the degree to which electoral, judicial, and other referee institutions are instrumentalized in favor of incumbents; the extent of genuine uncertainty over electoral outcomes; and whether peaceful alternation remains institutionally possible. The media mechanism being coded was not used as the decisive basis for placement.1 Each placement is assessed against independently established accounts of the country-period and reported in Table S1 (Haggard & Kaufman, 2021; Levitsky & Way, 2010; Papada et al., 2023). The same country may therefore occupy different positions at different times, as Russia does here. Some mechanisms recur across more than one position, one case spans a period that cannot be assigned to a single position, and others lie outside the spectrum altogether.

Singapore and Malaysia are retained on a different basis. The documented periods reflect durable dominant-party rule rather than an autocratizing episode, so they are treated as boundary cases even where those periods overlap the third wave. They show that a comparable control architecture can be reached by another route and support no position-specific configuration.

The three families are analytically parallel rather than historically coeval. The digital illustrations are confined to the 2010s and later, since the platform and surveillance infrastructures they involve did not exist across the earlier country-periods; digital mechanisms are accordingly compared across the three positions within that shorter span.

The mapping does not measure global prevalence, compare the magnitude of effects, claim that any mechanism is confined to a single position, argue that the configurations are irreversible, or establish how the mechanisms condition one another. It would require revision if the proposed distinctions could not be sustained at the level of instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form.

4. The Autocratization Spectrum and Its Actors

The mechanisms mapped below are compared not across a democracy–authoritarianism divide but along an autocratization spectrum. The gray zone Carothers (2002) identified in his discussion of the end of the transition paradigm is treated here not as a fixed hybrid-regime category but as a spectrum organized under the umbrella concept of autocratization (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019), within which democratic backsliding (Bermeo, 2016), competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky & Way, 2002), and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism (Schedler, 2006) mark three analytical positions rather than successive stages. These positions are analytical placements, not regime classifications: Waldner and Lust (2018) show that alternative coding schemes yield markedly different populations of backsliding cases, and contemporary autocratization itself unfolds through heterogeneous trajectories and modes (Cassani & Tomini, 2020). Levitsky and Way (2010) also caution that broad hybrid-regime categories can obscure institutionally consequential differences; the three positions are retained here to preserve those differences. What this literature renders intelligible is autocratization not as a temporary deviation on a path toward democratization but as a logic of governance that operates through, alongside, or by mimicking democratic procedures and can endure.

Across the spectrum, incumbent advantage becomes more consolidated as referee institutions are more systematically instrumentalized and electoral competition loses genuine uncertainty and a realistic prospect of peaceful alternation. Haggard and Kaufman (2021) provide an operational distinction relevant to this ordering, separating erosion, in which democratic rule persists, from reversion to authoritarian rule, which they identify by a decline below 0.5 on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Electoral Democracy Index. In democratic backsliding, executives may exert heavy pressure on media and referee institutions while peaceful alternation remains institutionally possible. Under competitive authoritarianism, courts, electoral commissions, and tax authorities are instrumentalized in favor of incumbents to intensify pressure on independent media and the opposition (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). Incumbents also deliberately produce procedural uncertainty (Schedler, 2013)—here over electoral rules, referee institutions, and the information environment—whereas procedural certainty largely persists under backsliding. Electoral competition does not disappear, but replacing the incumbent comes to require extraordinary mobilization. Under hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, the most consolidated position on the spectrum, elections become a one-sided ritual with a predetermined outcome; the label draws on Sartori’s (1976/2005) hegemonic-party typology.

These differences bear on media control less by changing the repertoire of available instruments than by changing the conditions under which they can be deployed. As referee institutions cease to act as independent constraints, fewer procedural obstacles stand between an instrument and its use; as electoral outcomes become more predictable, intervention need not wait for a proximate threat to materialize; and as peaceful alternation ceases to be a realistic prospect, arrangements can be built to last rather than kept reversible. The same legal, economic, and digital instruments can therefore settle into more continuous, encompassing, and pre-emptive institutional forms as incumbent advantage consolidates; this does not make any instrument unique to a single position.

The consolidation of incumbent advantage is coupled with authoritarian incumbents’ informational vulnerability. Schedler’s (2013) twin uncertainties are institutional—incumbents’ hold on power is never secure—and informational—they cannot know how secure they are, an opacity that repression deepens as concealed preferences and performances of loyalty multiply. Media control can therefore serve not only to suppress opposition content but to filter information flows, restrict opposition visibility, and manage the public appearance of consent. This informational problem is especially pronounced under competitive authoritarianism and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, where media constitute a central field in which the gap between incumbents’ perception of security and society’s visible political behavior is managed.

These mechanisms are deployed within a power bloc2 formed through the articulation of the political executive, the state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership networks around a shared hegemonic orientation. The bloc is not a homogeneous structure in which state, capital, and media merge, but a field of power in which actors that retain their institutional specificities are articulated along axes of political loyalty, economic interest, and regulatory privilege. Populist incumbents can supply a visible political idiom for this articulation by framing the judiciary and independent media as enemies of the people, an anti-elitism that erodes horizontal accountability (Müller, 2016). Within the framework developed here, such anti-elitism need not eliminate elites; it can coexist with a state-mediated reconfiguration that favors capital fractions dependent on the political executive. The relation is reciprocal: these fractions depend on incumbent power for access to public resources and regulatory privilege, while their media assets can convert that dependence into editorial restraint exercised on the incumbent’s behalf. The bloc does not require a populist idiom, however. Gradual transitions to electoral autocracy follow heterogeneous pathways rather than a single majoritarian anti-establishment pattern (Balderacchi & Tomini, 2024). Research on Central and Eastern Europe likewise shows that media domination can also deepen through oligarchic economic elites and ownership networks (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013; Štětka, 2015). Ownership therefore figures throughout the analysis that follows as a political–economic relation rather than merely a market outcome.

5. Mechanisms of Media Control

5.1. Legal Mechanisms of Media Control

A distinctive feature of contemporary autocratization is that repression operates not through crude lawlessness but through the selective application of legal formality in favor of incumbent power. Law thus shifts from a normative framework constraining power (rule of law) to a technique of governance (rule by law) (Ginsburg & Moustafa, 2008), a shift that expands the governing capacity of the power bloc. In the media field, it produces a selective repertoire of legal intervention that operates with varying intensity across the autocratization spectrum, subjecting independent journalism, media ownership, and regulatory institutions to financial, administrative, and judicial pressures.

In democratic backsliding, this transformation subjects democratic institutions to gradual constitutional retrogression (Ginsburg & Huq, 2018). While formally adhering to the letter of the law, the political executive erodes the unwritten convention of institutional forbearance (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018) through legally permissible practices that strain checks and balances, a dynamic Tushnet (2004) calls constitutional hardball. Pressure on the media forms part of this erosion, advancing through executive aggrandizement (Bermeo, 2016) as executive influence over regulatory institutions, the judicial bureaucracy, and public broadcasting expands. In Hungary, parliamentary regulations expanding appointment powers over regulatory boards facilitated the capture of public broadcasting (Bajomi-Lázár, 2013), and media-policy changes in Poland between 2015 and 2018 did the same through executive aggrandizement (Surowiec et al., 2020). Appointment mechanisms for regulatory authorities and public broadcasters can also be designed to install aligned cadres and secure institutional continuity in favor of the power bloc, a pattern read here through Bajomi-Lázár’s (2015) concept of party colonization of the media. By analogy with Schedler’s (2013, p. 88) “fencing-off” by unelected actors, media policy and regulatory oversight can thereby be lodged in nominally autonomous bodies marked by low accountability and openness to executive influence. While claiming to apply impartial standards, oversight institutions become de facto implementers of the executive’s policy of institutional erosion.

In democratic backsliding, legal control creates an unpredictable environment of judicial risk that raises the cost of critical journalism and makes self-censorship a rational survival response. Instrumentalized strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), high compensation claims, protracted proceedings, and threats of administrative and financial sanctions act as deterrents, generating a chilling effect and rendering media organizations legally and economically vulnerable. In Poland, the daily Gazeta Wyborcza faced more than a hundred lawsuits and other forms of legal harassment between 2015 and 2022, brought by claimants including the ruling party’s chairman and the public broadcaster (Bodnar & Gliszczyńska-Grabias, 2023). In Turkey, the 2009 tax penalties imposed on Doğan Media left the group financially exposed (Guriev & Treisman, 2022; Yanardağoğlu, 2021); the case is retained here as a democratic-end boundary illustration and precedes the ownership transfer described in Section 5.2.

In competitive authoritarianism, legal repression not only produces institutional erosion within legal formality but also assumes a more coercive form that selectively disciplines opposition actors, independent journalists, and critical media outlets. Scheppele’s (2018) concept of autocratic legalism explains how legal and constitutional procedures are themselves rewritten under legal guises to dismantle checks on executive power. Discriminatory legalism, which Müller (2016, p. 46) glosses as “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” specifies the selective application of existing laws along a friend–enemy distinction. For opposition and independent media, law thus ceases to constrain incumbent power and becomes a weapon of repression: journalistic activities are criminalized through vague laws on “defamation/libel,” public order, or security and kept under constant judicial threat (Ginsburg & Huq, 2018). The Chávez government’s 2007 refusal to renew RCTV’s license on “public order” grounds illustrates a licensing variant of this selective legalism (Corrales, 2015).

The second dimension of legal repression under competitive authoritarianism extends this intervention into media ownership and relations of economic dependency. Practices theorized as “legal” repression (Levitsky & Way, 2002) and described as the weaponization of referees (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018) involve the selective use of the state’s tax, debt-enforcement, licensing, and oversight apparatuses against media owners. Legal repression thus operates as a mechanism of restructuring: it weakens independent media owners through financial and administrative pressure and transforms ownership in favor of capital fractions dependent on incumbent power. Russia’s debt-based transfer of NTV to Gazprom (Levitsky & Way, 2002) illustrates how legal repression reshapes media ownership networks through economic pressure.

Under hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, legal repression hardens from the episodic, ex post harassment of competitive authoritarianism into a durable order of institutional protection. Consistent with Landau’s (2013) abusive constitutionalism, incumbents use ostensibly legal and constitutional instruments to entrench the regime rather than merely discipline specific opponents. Varol’s (2015) stealth authoritarianism captures how this entrenchment proceeds under the guise of legality instead of the overt suspension of law.

Here, vague laws on “terrorism,” “foreign agents,” or “disinformation” function not as reactive penalties but as the standing legal architecture of exclusion. They underpin license revocation, criminal prosecution, financial strangulation, and institutional liquidation, while regulatory barriers pre-emptively restrict the entry of new alternative media actors (Voltmer, 2013). This exclusionary logic appears in Russia’s “foreign agent” designation, introduced in 2012 against externally funded civil society organizations (Christensen & Weinstein, 2013) and extended to independent outlets and journalists in November 2017 (Polyakova & Meserole, 2019).

5.2. Economic Mechanisms of Media Control

The political–economic dimension of contemporary autocratization lies in the capacity to discipline media through relations of dependence linking the political executive, the state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership networks, mediated by public resources, ownership relations, advertising, and financing channels. Under autocratization, ownership concentration, advertising dependence, and market-based exclusion become selectively deployable instruments of control: what Kaitatzi-Whitlock (2011) locates in the structural logic of neoliberal markets is here wielded as a deliberate instrument of incumbent power. Fuchs’s (2018) authoritarian capitalism captures the resulting political–economic order, in which the boundaries between state power and capital interests become blurred. Formal models of government control converge on the same point: state and private ownership differ less in outcome than in the mechanism through which influence is exercised (Gehlbach & Sonin, 2014). Economic domination assumes two main forms: party-state-driven commercialization, as observed in China (Lee et al., 2007; Winfield & Peng, 2005), and a clientelist media–political complex characterized by the interlocking of state and media interests under crony capitalism (Voltmer, 2013). Within the power bloc, media ownership becomes a relational node connecting political loyalty, economic privilege, and editorial compliance.

In democratic backsliding, economic control operates through the selective allocation of public resources and implicit relations of dependence. Recipient outlets and owners are already embedded in relations that bind state and capital, so allocation reproduces a dependent position rather than functioning as payment for favorable coverage (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013; Voltmer, 2013). State tenders, legal privileges, and public loans operate as a carrot-and-stick mechanism, rewarding pro-incumbent and penalizing oppositional actors (Dragomir, 2018). Official notices and state advertising, distributed along partisan lines, function as covert state subsidies, rendering the media a component of a “politico-media oligopolistic power centre” (Voltmer, 2013, p. 225) where political power and economic interests intersect. Di Tella and Franceschelli’s (2011) study of Argentina, retained here as a democratic-end boundary illustration, shows how state advertising can function as a mechanism of media capture. Bátorfy and Urbán (2020) argue that state advertising in Hungary functioned as an instrument of political favoritism and market distortion in the restructuring of media-market relations.

Private-sector advertising complements public financing pressure through alignment mechanisms that redirect budgets toward pro-incumbent outlets and away from critical media. As the cases of Armenia and India show, it can function as an additional instrument of control that erodes media autonomy (Izquierdo-Iranzo & Sayadyan, 2024; Narisetti, 2021). Converging public and private financial pressures create persistent economic uncertainty for media owners and journalists, encouraging self-censorship. Márquez-Ramírez and Guerrero’s (2017) analysis of the captured liberal model in Latin America shows that, within the nexus of the political executive, media ownership, and business circles, these mechanisms can produce editorial alignment and self-censorship without eliminating the formal existence of liberal media institutions.

Under competitive authoritarianism, economic control assumes a more overt and coercive form of media capture. Economic pressure squeezes critical media owners within the market, producing forced sales in favor of capital fractions dependent on incumbent power (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). Taxes, debt, licensing, public-bank financing, and regulatory audits are the principal instruments of this realignment. Fiscal instruments can also operate on the buyer’s side rather than the seller’s: targeted taxation may depress the market value of a media property, lowering the cost of its acquisition by aligned capital (Dragomir, 2019). In Turkey, the fiscal pressure described in Section 5.1 culminated in May 2018, when the remaining Doğan group was transferred to the pro-incumbent Demirören Holding through state-bank financing (Akser & Baybars, 2024; Finkel, 2021). A related ownership configuration was already visible in Hungary during democratic erosion, documented less as a datable sequence than as settled ownership by businessmen tied to the incumbent party (Štětka, 2015), embedded in the clientelist oligarchic networks central to what Magyar (2016) theorizes as a post-communist mafia state. Both show how media ownership can be systematically reorganized through pro-incumbent networks. Media then cease to be autonomous commercial enterprises governed by a journalistic rationale and instead protect their owners’ interests in other sectors, access to public tenders, and relations with incumbent power, so that capital fractions dependent on incumbent power come to exercise censorship on the incumbent’s behalf (Schiffrin, 2021).

Under hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, by contrast, economic control subordinates the media market’s overall organizing logic to a closed architecture centered on the party-state or dominant party. This logic cannot be reduced to the Chinese-style party-state model; in dominant-party regimes such as Singapore and Malaysia, the media market can be controlled through political loyalty, ownership concentration, and regulatory dependence even while private ownership formally persists (George, 2017; Nain, 2000). These are boundary cases rather than positions on the spectrum: durable dominant-party regimes rather than instances of autocratization, they show that the same market architecture can be reached without a prior democratic phase. Ownership, financing, advertising, distribution, and production inputs are organized under the concentrated control of regime-loyal actors, so that economic domination becomes a pre-emptive market architecture regulating the resource flows, production inputs, and circulation channels of the wider media ecosystem. Venezuela’s currency controls, which from 2003 obstructed newsprint imports for the opposition press and intensified through the 2007 crisis, and Kazakhstan’s selective paper shortages under Nazarbayev (Guriev & Treisman, 2022) illustrate how this operates as infrastructural containment. The Venezuelan country-period is placed in the competitive-authoritarian position, and the Kazakh case is retained as an outside-spectrum boundary illustration (see the Supplementary Materials). In Belarus, state distribution monopolies excluded independent newspapers from subscription and retail networks, while printing restrictions forced six titles to print abroad (Haraszti, 2005). By entrenching the resource advantages that electoral autocrats hold over their opponents (Schedler, 2013), this containment restricts the material conditions of independent journalism and pluralistic competition.

5.3. Digital Mechanisms of Media Control

Digital control restructures the visibility, circulation, access, and data infrastructures of public communication through manipulation, surveillance, filtering, and platform governance. Artificial intelligence (AI) expands this repertoire by scaling synthetic content production, surveillance and classification, and the predictive identification of mobilization for targeted or pre-emptive intervention.

In democratic backsliding, digital control operates less through direct censorship than through the political reorganization of visibility, trust, and engagement in the digital public sphere. A principal digital instrument is Howard’s (2020) computational propaganda: bots, fake accounts, algorithms, and coordinated human intervention bury opposition information beneath noise and fabricated content. Tufekci (2017) conceptualizes contemporary censorship through information glut and the denial of attention; in this mapping, computational propaganda works through both, disrupting visibility and weakening information’s capacity to translate into collective action without fully blocking access. Its systemic consequence is the erosion of shared factual ground that Benkler et al. (2018) call an epistemic crisis, produced not only by platform technologies but by asymmetric media structures and partisan radicalization. Its political function is not to secure belief in a particular narrative but to produce informational attrition and demobilization. Generative AI extends computational propaganda’s existing capacity rather than constituting a separate mechanism, enabling persuasive, microtargeted synthetic content to be produced at lower cost and greater scale (Prien & Goldhammer, 2024), while AI-enabled deepfakes pose an acute threat to electoral integrity (Diamond, 2019).

Combined with automated astroturfing and coordinated discrediting, this capacity enables networks linked to incumbent power to target opposition actors and undermine their credibility (Feldstein, 2021); such campaigns can manufacture a climate of enemy-construction that pressures them to withdraw from the digital public sphere. Brazil’s “Office of Hatred,” a WhatsApp-based operation that extended campaign-era computational propaganda into an institutionalized governmental practice used to disseminate disinformation and attack political opponents, exemplifies this pattern (Ozawa et al., 2023). Such interventions raise opposition actors’ costs of speaking, becoming visible, and sustaining an online presence (Earl et al., 2022).

In competitive authoritarianism, digital control becomes a more coordinated form of repression that renders opposition organization and collective-action capacity manageable through cyber surveillance, risk classification, and targeted intervention. The partially open online sphere functions as a sensor field for collecting opposition actors’ digital traces, network ties, and mobilization signals. MacKinnon’s (2011) networked authoritarianism, developed from the fully authoritarian Chinese case, describes a digital sphere organized for legitimacy production, data collection, and controlled participation. Elements of this architecture recur where opposition retains genuine electoral strength, but with different targets and proximate effects: surveillance and data-processing capacities selectively constrain opposition networks through AI-based classification, risk profiling, and facial recognition rather than primarily organizing legitimacy production and controlled participation. Huawei-backed “Safe City” cameras installed in Belgrade in 2019 supplied footage that police leaked to pro-government outlets, which then exposed the identities of protesters (Feldstein, 2021).

This surveillance capacity becomes more intrusive through commercial spyware and targeted hacking. Tools acquired from global cybersecurity markets penetrate opposition actors’ private communications, compromising organizational security, source confidentiality, and collective-action capacity. Feldstein (2021) counts at least sixty-four countries, spanning several regime types, in which governments have turned commercial spyware on domestic actors—journalists, activists, opposition politicians, and critics of the regime. Glasius and Michaelsen (2018) classify arbitrary surveillance as an illiberal rather than authoritarian practice, because its primary harm lies in infringements of individual autonomy and dignity. In this mapping, it becomes a media-control mechanism where it compromises the protection of journalistic sources: sources withdraw, and journalism’s capacity to scrutinize power is reduced.

Digital repression deepens during disputes over electoral fraud, mass protests, or security crises, when infrastructural sabotage is activated to disrupt the opposition’s coordination capacity. Turkey’s routinized bandwidth throttling after the Gezi Park protests (Tufekci, 2017; Yeşil, 2018) can be read through Roberts’s (2018, p. 42) concept of friction, developed from China’s Great Firewall context. Friction is censorship that acts like a “tax on information”: it raises the time and effort access requires rather than blocking it, and thereby disrupts the timing of collective action. Localized internet shutdowns in India between 2011 and 2017 are retained here as a cross-position illustration (Rydzak, 2019) and represent a more direct interruption of connectivity. Gohdes (2024) shows that the choice between shutting down access and monitoring it is itself a strategic one, since surveillance supports selective targeting while access restrictions accompany broader, less targeted repression. Coordinated flooding by troll and bot networks likewise saturates opposition channels with noise, distraction, and pro-incumbent content, raising the cost of accessing reliable information and diverting public attention from moments of mobilization (Earl et al., 2022; Feldstein, 2021). Cyber-harassment, state-sponsored hacking, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) takedowns of independent media portals complement this crisis-oriented repertoire, asymmetrically tilting the digital infrastructure of pluralistic competition rather than abolishing it outright (Guriev & Treisman, 2022).

In hegemonic electoral authoritarianism, digital control organizes the digital public sphere through an integrated, regime-centered governance architecture rather than episodic censorship. Hardware infrastructure, software filtering, platform rules, and surveillance technologies predetermine the boundaries of online circulation. This architecture is legitimated through claims to digital sovereignty, which Pohle and Thiel (2020) conceptualize less as a legal or organizational concept than as a discursive practice through which states reassert authority over digital infrastructures and communication within their territory. Such claims acquire legal-administrative force through restrictions on foreign platforms, incentives for domestic ecosystems, and mandates concerning local representation, content removal, and data retention, which bind public communication to a platform-data regime under the incumbent’s oversight. Russia’s 2015 data-localization requirements exemplify this architecture by mandating local storage of Russian users’ personal data (Shahbaz & Funk, 2020). The 2016 Yarovaya amendments require data retention and security-service access to metadata and encrypted communications, creating a legalized surveillance architecture whose primary targets include independent media (Polyakova & Meserole, 2019). Within these semi-closed ecosystems, filtering operates selectively: permitted discussion of everyday grievances (MacKinnon, 2011) may function as a safety valve (Gunitsky, 2015), while content with collective-action potential is systematically suppressed (King et al., 2013).

The most far-reaching dimension of this architecture is algorithmic pre-emptive control. Integrating AI and big data allows digital traces to be converted into risk profiles that identify potential mobilization before it takes organized form; Feldstein (2021) links such capacities to targeted detentions, preventive arrests, and chilling effects that can arise even without sustained physical violence. Beraja et al.’s (2023) AI-tocracy, demonstrated empirically through evidence on facial-recognition AI procurement in China, shows that this capacity is institutional rather than merely technical, sustained by a feedback loop among public procurement, security demand, and technology firms’ innovation capacity. Moscow’s facial-recognition systems (Polyakova & Meserole, 2019) show the same technology deployed in an electoral-authoritarian setting; once in place, such infrastructure can act as a ratchet against re-democratization (Karpa & Rochlitz, 2025).

6. Discussion

The dominant institutional form named in each cell of Table 1 is not an exclusive one: mechanisms recur across positions and accumulate within a country-period, so that countries may display hybrid combinations rather than the profile of a single column. Accumulation is also observable across families. Turkey illustrates it on a single owner: the 2009 tax penalties left Doğan Media financially exposed (Guriev & Treisman, 2022); the group sold the daily newspapers Milliyet and Vatan over 2010–2011 (Yanardağoğlu, 2021), and in May 2018 what remained passed to a pro-incumbent holding through state-bank financing (Akser & Baybars, 2024; Finkel, 2021). The sequence also spans changing analytical placements: the 2009 penalty precedes Turkey’s autocratization episode, while the 2018 transfer falls within competitive authoritarianism. Legal exposure preceded the final transfer by nearly a decade; the mapping does not establish that one caused the other, but the case illustrates how mechanisms can accumulate across families as incumbent advantage consolidates.

The nine cells of Table 1 should not be read as nine independent tool sets. Across the three families, the same actors recur: the owners exposed to tax penalties and debt enforcement are the owners whose acquisitions public banks finance and whose other businesses depend on public tenders, and the regulators that license broadcasters are also among the institutions whose appointment mechanisms executive aggrandizement reaches. What the mapping makes visible is therefore not three parallel repertoires but three institutional domains through which a shared set of dependency relations operates. The concept of the power bloc captures this shared architecture. Because the political executive, the state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership networks are articulated rather than fused, control need not be exercised in any single domain: pressure applied in one alters the resources with which an actor could resist in another. Financial exposure can reduce an owner’s capacity to resist ownership realignment, while ownership held by capital fractions dependent on incumbent power can convert otherwise contestable legal pressure into owner-imposed restraint. A field already organized through such dependencies may likewise offer fewer points of refusal to platform obligations and data mandates. These are relations of enablement that the mapping makes visible in the co-presence of mechanisms rather than a sequence it establishes, and how they condition one another requires separate analysis.

A second implication follows from how this control is defended. Because it operates through legality, market transactions, and routine administration, it can register as ordinary institutional conduct. The opening created by placing residual responsibility for adequate press performance in the hands of government itself (Hocking, 1947) reappears in what is termed here the public-order exception and becomes institutionalized through vague provisions on public order and terrorism (Corrales, 2015; Varol, 2015). Digital-sovereignty claims likewise rework the critique of the free-flow doctrine (Hamelink, 1988/1997; Mattelart, 1979; Schiller, 1976): data-localization and content-removal mandates are defended as safeguards against foreign control while binding domestic communication more closely to state oversight (Shahbaz & Funk, 2020). Critical political economy located constraint primarily in the structural organization of markets and capital (Golding & Murdock, 1974/1997; Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2011; Knoche, 2021); autocratizing incumbents, however, can selectively exploit the dependencies generated within those structures through state power, using tenders, credit, and advertising allocation. None of these traditions produced these practices. Some left justificatory openings available for selective reuse; another supplied an analytical vocabulary within which politically organized dependencies can appear as ordinary commercial relations.

Not every constraint on media autonomy follows from incumbent control: falling advertising revenues, platform concentration, and polarized audience demand can produce similar outcomes, and these factors enter this mapping only where they are politically organized or selectively deployed by incumbent actors. The framework accordingly addresses autocratizing contexts that retain electoral institutions and formally plural media markets; stronger rule-of-law or supranational constraints may limit the selective deployment and institutionalization of these mechanisms, while direct administrative command may reduce their analytical centrality where electoral competition is absent.

7. Conclusions

Media domination in contemporary autocratization extends beyond overt censorship and media closures. It operates through legal regulation, relations of economic dependence, and digital infrastructures that together reorganize the conditions of journalistic production and circulation.

The mapping developed here shows that mechanisms are not confined to a single analytical position: the same instrument can recur across positions while mechanisms differ in their targets, proximate effects, and institutional form. Within the evidentiary scope of the literature and country-period illustrations assembled here, dominant institutional forms are ordered across the spectrum as increasingly continuous, encompassing, and pre-emptive. Legal control ranges from deterrent uncertainty, through selective weaponization, to institutionalized exclusion; economic control from discretionary dependence, through ownership realignment, to closed resource architectures; and digital control from visibility manipulation, through targeted surveillance, to pre-emptive governance. This ordering is ideal-typical and directional rather than a historical sequence or an irreversible progression, and it implies nothing about the prevalence of these forms or the magnitude of their effects.

The three families are not independent. They operate through shared dependencies linking the political executive, the state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership networks, which is where the concept of the power bloc does its explanatory work: control exercised in one domain can alter the resources with which media actors could resist in another. The mapping makes these cross-domain relations of enablement visible but does not establish a causal sequence among mechanisms. Because much of this control proceeds through legality and ordinary market and administrative transactions, inherited justificatory rationales can make it more readily defensible as legitimate intervention, while an inherited analytical vocabulary can allow politically organized market dependencies to appear as ordinary commercial relations.

None of this amounts to total domination. Whether these configurations can be reversed requires separate analysis; the media field remains an arena of contestation even as the conditions of that contestation are reorganized by the mechanisms mapped here.