Please join us for an upcoming seminar on South Asian politics, co-hosted by the Saxena Center at Brown University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Mittal Institute at Harvard University. The seminar will feature Adam Auerbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University.
Local journalists are central to the production of political information in many democracies, yet they remain largely absent from the literature on the political economy of accountability. The talk is based on research that studies “stringers”—freelance journalists who are major local news producers in India—and asks two related questions: in a context with heightened political risks to covering acts of misgovernance, what kinds of stories do stringers choose to cover? And how does political interference shape the content of their reporting? To answer these questions, the study draws on qualitative fieldwork, interviews, and an original, in-person survey with 929 stringers in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Contrary to expectations that political risk suppresses accountability journalism, the study finds experimental and qualitative evidence that stringers strongly prefer reporting on government misconduct and underperformance over more innocuous, social-interest stories. This preference is robust across partisan lines and levels of economic vulnerability. Yet a second survey experiment reveals the limits of this professional orientation. When politicians directly intervene—through rewards or threats—stringers are significantly more likely to soften their coverage, removing explicit blame on the politician for governing deficits. The cumulative effect of such interference may be a systematically muted news environment, even where professional norms remain intact. Findings suggest that local journalists retain meaningful professional commitments to accountability reporting, but that political pressure blunts the sharpness of democratic information environments.
Speaker:
Adam Auerbach, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University.
About the Speaker:
Adam Auerbach is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research centers on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. He is the author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which examines how slum residents in India demand and secure public services, and Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness (Princeton University Press, 2023), co-authored with Tariq Thachil. His research on governance and development in India has been published in leading political science and development journals.
