Mass Media and Special Interest Groups

Media revenues are an important determinant of media behavior. News coverage depends not only on the preferences of media consumers but also on the preferences of advertisers or subsidizing groups. We present a theoretical model of the interaction between special interest groups and media outlets in which the media face a trade-off between a larger audience and lower payments from special interest groups versus a smaller audience and more biased content. We focus on the relationship between the costs of production of media product and the level of distortion in news coverage that can be introduced by interest groups. Speciically, we look at the effect of falling marginal costs or the growing reliance on advertising revenues. We show that if people do not want to tolerate bias, or if special interest groups have budget constraint, then this effect is negative. If people do not pay attention to bias, or if the size of the audience is very important for the interest group, then this effect becomes positive. If markets are fully covered, and all consumers buy one unit of media product, then the effect disappears.

Evolution of Risk and Political Regimes

The article contributes to the growing literature on intermediate regiimes by presenting a model that incorporates key features of such regimes and generates several of the "stylized facts" that characterize their behavior: their political volatility, cross nationality and over time, and the veriability of their economic performance something that renders their economies among the fastest growing and declining in global samples. Using an instrumental veriables approach, we test the model employing cross-national data.

Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

This paper compares electoral outcomes of 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia among geographical areas with differential access to the only independent from the government national TV channel. It was available to three-quarters of Russia’s population and its signal availability was idiosyncratic conditional on observables. Independent TV decreased aggregate vote for the government party by 8.9 percentage points, increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 6.3 percentage points, and decreased turnout by 3.8 percentage points. The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched independent TV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month before elections.

Underground Hindu and Buddhist-inspired religious movements in Soviet Russia

Underground Hindu and Buddhist-inspired religious movements in Soviet Russia The paper deals with the activities of the underground religious/ spiritual movements, whose teachings are largely influenced or contain the elements of Eastern (in particular, Indian) religions and philosophies, in the Soviet Russia. Special attention is paid to Buddhist and Hindu-inspired movements (the group of Bidiia Dandaron, ISKCON and yogic groups, Kunta Yoga adherents etc). Although the research mainly focuses on the period between the late 1950s and the late 1980s (characterized by the return to the active persecution of religion) it is also placed in the historical context of tsarist and especially Soviet governments’ policies towards the people, practicing Eastern religions. Ironically, the attempts of the Soviet authorities to impose a ban on all the manifestations of religiosity or at least to keep them all under control led to quite an opposite result. The members of the underground groups of that time mention that the ‘meaninglessness and suffocating monotony’ of their existence required some kind of compensation, which obviously could be found only in spiritual sphere. Thus, the situation which developed in the USSR in the above-mentioned period gave rise to a unique generation of spiritual seekers, whose protest against the lack of freedom and information developed into specific forms. It included both the individual/inner form, aimed at spiritual self-improvement and self-education, and collective/outer forms, such as joining religious groups, participation in seminars and lectures, publishing and spreading of the samizdat literature, copying and translating of western literature, occasional contacts with foreigners – fighters for human rights and other forms of underground dissident activity. The paper examines the particular explosion of interest in Asia and Eastern religions in the 19601980, which could be explained by the desire to withdraw from the realities of the Soviet regime and to experience the exotic faraway ‘elsewhere’, but at the same time is part of the worldwide trend, which could be characterized by the deviation from traditional mainstream religions and an increase of attention towards unusual, sometimes even bizarre ideas and teachings

Newspapers and Parties: How Advertising Revenues Created an Independent Press

Does economic development stimulates media freedom? Do higher advertising revenues make media outlets more willing to be independent from external political groups of inuence? I use data on 19th century American newspapers to show that in places with higher potential advertising revenues newspapers were more likely to be independent from political parties. I \u85nd similar results when local advertising rates are instrumented by regulations of outdoor advertising and of newspaper distribution. I also show that newly created newspapers were more likely to enter the market as indpendents in places with higher advertising rates. Finally, I present evidence that economic development alone cannot explain the observed growth of independent newspapers, and some political factors also played the role

Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia

How do media affect voting behavior? What difference can an independent media outlet make in a country with state-controlled media? Our paper addresses these questions by comparing electoral outcomes and votes reported by survey respondents during the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia for those geographical areas that had access and those that had no access to the only national TV channel independent from the government (“NTV”). The effect is identified from exogenous variation in the availability of the signal, which appears to be mostly idiosyncratic, conditional on controls. The findings are as follows. 1) The presence of the independent TV channel decreased the aggregate vote for the government party by 2.5 percentage points and increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 2.1 percentage points. 2) The probability of voting for opposition parties increased for individuals who watched NTV even controlling for voting intentions measured one month prior to the elections. 3) NTV had a smaller effect on votes of people with higher political knowledge and those using alternative sources of political news and a larger effect on retired persons who watch TV substantially more than working individuals.

Newspapers and Parties: How Advertising Revenues Created an Independent Press

Does economic development promote media freedom? Do higher advertising revenues tend to make media outlets independent of political groups?in?uence? Using data on the 19th century American newspapers, I show that in places with higher advertising revenues, newspapers were more likely to be independent from political parties. Similar results hold when local advertising rates are instrumented by regulations on outdoor advertising and newspaper distribution. I also show that newly created newspapers were more likely to enter the market as independents in markets with higher advertising rates.

A Description Of Space Relations In An NLP Model: The ABBYY Compreno Approach

The current paper is devoted to a formal analysis of the space category and, especially, to questions bound with the presentation of space relations in a formal NLP model. The aim is to demonstrate how linguistic and cognitive problems relating to spatial categorization, definition of spatial entities, and the expression of different locative senses in natural languages can be solved in an artificial intelligence system. We offer a description of the locative groups in the ABBYY Compreno formalism – an integral NLP framework applied for machine translation, semantic search, fact extraction, and other tasks based on the semantic analysis of texts. The model is based on a universal semantic hierarchy of the thesaurus type and includes a description of all possible semantic and syntactic links every word can attach. In this work we define the set of semantic locative relations between words, suggest different tools for their syntactic presentation, give formal restrictions for the word classes that can denote spaces, and show different strategies of dealing with locative prepositions, especially as far as the problem of their machine translation is concerned