This thesis is concerned with the rise of independent booksellers in China since the late 2000s. Drawing on the findings of a qualitative study I conducted with 55 independent booksellers between 2014 and 2015, I argue that independent bookselling in China is an economic activity politicized, and the emergence and development of independent booksellers has been a process shaped by both economic and socio-political factors stemming from both inside and outside the book industry. Studying independent bookselling, a significant change in the Chinese book industry in recent years, my thesis advances our understanding of the transformation of the book industry in China. The notion of ‘politicization’ provides a useful analytical framework for understanding bookselling and publishing in parallel contexts. Finally, by elucidating the distinctive relationship between the evolution of the book industry and some wider social, political and economic processes in China, my thesis adds to the political economy of the media industry in non-Western societies and contributes to the de-Westernization of this long-dominant and yet problematic approach to the study of the media and media industries.

This thesis consists of three stand-alone chapters studying theoretical models concerning a range of issues that take place within the context of political delegation: tax enforcement, political selection, electoral campaigning. First chapter studies the problem of a small electorate of workers who cannot influence tax rates but can influence their local politicians to interfere with tax enforcement. It develops a two-candidate Downsian voting model where voters are productivity-heterogenous workers who supply labour to a local firm that can engage in costly tax evasion while facing an exogenously given payroll tax collected at the firm level. Two purely office motivated local politicians compete in a winner-takes-all election by offering fine reductions to take place if the firm gets caught evading. Two results stand out. First, equilibrium tax evasion is (weakly) increasing in the productivity of the median voter as a result of the latter demanding a weaker enforcement regime through more aggressive fine reductions. Second, if politicians were able to propose and commit on tax rates as well, then the enforcement process would be interference-free and the tax level would coincide with the median voter's optimal level. These two results underline the fact that from voters' perspective, influencing enforcement policy is an imperfect substitute for influencing tax policy in achieving an optimal redistribution scheme due to tax evasion being costly. In other words, a lax enforcement pattern in a given polity can be indicative of a political demand arising as an attempt to attain a redistributive second-best when influencing tax policy is not a possibility. Second chapter turns attention to the role and incentives of media in the context of ex ante political selection, i.e. at the electoral participation level. It constructs a signalling model with pure adverse selection where a candidate whose quality is private information decides on whether to challenge an incumbent whose quality is common knowledge given an electorate composed of voters who are solely interested in electing the best politician. Electoral participation is costly and before the election, a benevolent media outlet which is assumed to be acting in the best interest of voters decides on whether to undertake a costly investigation that may or may not reveal challenger's quality and transmit this information to voters. The focus of the chapter is on studying the selection and incentive effects of changes in media's information technology. The setting creates a strategic interaction between challenger entry and media activity, which gives rise to two main results. First, an improvement in media's information technology, whether due to cost reductions or gains in investigative strength always (weakly) improves ex ante selection by increasing minimum challenger quality in equilibrium. Second, while lower information costs always (weakly) make the media more active, an higher media strength may reduce its journalistic activity, especially if it is already strong. The intuition behind this asymmetry is simple. While both types of improvements increase media's expected net benefits from journalism, a boost to its investigative strength also makes the media more threatening for inferior challengers at a given level of journalistic activity. Combining this with the first result implies that the media can afford being more passive without undermining selection if it is sufficiently strong to begin with. In short, a strong media might lead to a relatively passive media, even though the media is "working as intended". Third chapter is about electoral campaigns. More precisely, it is a theoretical investigation into one possible audience-related cause for diverging campaign structures of different candidates competing for the same office: state of political knowledge in an electorate. Electorate is assumed to consist of a continuum of voters heterogenous along two dimensions: policy preferences and political knowledge. The latter is assumed to partition the set of voters into ignorant and informed segments, with the former consisting of voters who are unable to condition their voting decisions on the policy dimension. Political competition takes place within a probabilistic voting setting with two candidates, but instead of costless policy proposals as in a standard probabilistic voting model, it revolves around campaigning. Electoral campaigning is modelled as a limited resource allocation problem between two activities: policy campaigning and valence campaigning. The former permits candidates to relocate from their initial policy positions (reputations or legacies), which are assumed to be at the opposing segments of the policy space (i.e. left and right). The latter allows them to generate universal support via a partisanship effect and can be interpreted as an investment into non-policy campaign content such as impressionistic advertising, recruitment of writers capable of producing emotionally appealing speeches, etc. The chapter has two central results. First, a candidate's resource allocation to valence campaigning increases with the fraction of ignorant voters, ideological (non-policy) heterogeneity of informed voters and proximity of candidate's initial position to the bliss point of the informed pseudo-swing voter. The last one results from decreasing relative marginal returns for politicians from converging to pseudo- swing voter's ideal position. Second, even if candidates are otherwise symmetric, a monotonic association between policy preferences and political knowledge can induce divergence into campaign structures. For instance, if ignorance and policy preferences are positively correlated (e.g. less educated preferring more public good) then the left candidate would conduct a campaign with a heavier valence focus and vice versa. Underlying this result is again the decreasing relative marginal returns argument: a candidate whose initial position is already close to that of the informed pseudo-swing voter would benefit more from a valence oriented campaign. An implication of this is that a party that is known having a relatively more ignorant voter base can end up conducting a much more policy focused campaign compared to a party that is largely associated with politically aware voters.

This thesis is a study of how the Swedish media company MTG Radio has developed new strategies and production practices in relation to technological change, new competition and media convergence during the first decade of the 2000s. During this period the media landscape in general has been marked by digitization, the rise of new media platforms and competition from new media companies. The study engages in an ethnographical perspective on media production, but also takes its starting point in political-economic theories on media work (Banks 2007, Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011, Ryan 1992) in order to raise questions about the relation between technological and organizational changes and relations of power in production. Empirically, the thesis builds on interviews with production staff as well as an analysis of production documents and content produced by MTG Radio. The analysis shows that digital production technologies contribute to anincreased automation and centralization of control over editorial decisions, and hence to “de-skilling” (Braverman 1974/1999, Örnebring 2010). On the other hand, strategies of multiplatform production and the organizational changes taking place contribute to an “upskilling” (Edgell 2012) and give DJs and presenters more autonomy and control within production. This strengthened autonomy involves their possibilities for reflexivity and critical self-evaluation, as well as their control over content and production. Finally, the thesis connects these results to the more overarching question of alienation, arguing that upskilling and increased autonomy do not automatically create better jobs within the media house, or necessarily represent emancipatory possibilities within media work, as has been argued in previous research and theory.

Given the background of rising economic inequalities, the topic has reentered the field of economic science. Yet the problem of how economic inequality is being mediated to the public is not discussed in economics at all, and hardly mentioned in communication studies. Through an analysis of recent empirical studies on the coverage of inequality in the media, we debate the role mass media play as information providers. Assessing the underlying assumptions and the methodological approaches guiding the respective empirical findings, we can highlight the merits of this body of work and identify open questions for further research. The last part of the article provides a discussion of (currently rather neglected) political economy theories that offer rich theoretical approaches to study media, power, and inequality.

One of the most significant economic developments over the past decades has been the rise in income and wealth inequality. After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have reentered the stage of mainstream political attention in the Western heartland over the past couple of years. This is due, in part, to the high public profile of publications by Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson. In line with the growing significance of deepening economic inequalities, this Special Section engages with two broad, if overlapping, questions: (1) How do new forms of economic inequality, power, and privilege relate to relevant theories and conceptualizations of the media and institutions of public communication, whether in the fields of communication studies or political economy? (2) What role do the new forms of economic inequality play today in the typical narratives of mediated communication, and how is such inequality framed and discussed?

Based on the political economy of the media perspective, this paper explores the media coverage of wealth and inheritance taxation over the early 21st century (2000 to 2018) based on a large-scale corpus of seven German daily and weekly newspapers. Germany is a useful case study, being one of the most unequal countries in the Eurozone area in terms of wealth inequality. Drawing on text mining methods and corpus linguistics, it shows that wealth and inheritance taxation is a relatively infrequent topic over the entire period, with the exception of a few intense months of increased reporting. On the occasions that the media do report on the topic of wealth and inheritance taxation, it is mainly covered in terms of a political debate. This debate centres on the politics of a possible reform process and the connected difficulties of finding compromise between different actors, rather than focussing on the potential economic impact. Furthermore, this paper explores the power of agents (both on the organisational and individual level) as the primary definers of social reality. It shows that market-liberal and conservative organisations and economists dominate the news over social-democratic and left-wing ones. Overall, the findings indicate a hostile news coverage concerning the introduction of wealth taxation and the increase of inheritance tax. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Political structures and the evolution of late capitalism in liberal Western democracies lend a common frame to the development of national media systems. However, whereas media policy from the post-war period to the mid-1980s was largely driven by socio-political concerns and coextensive with policy for public service television, this model has been vehemently challenged. Key factors were the convergence of erstwhile-separated industries and infrastructures, as well as the ambitions of the corporate sector and governments alike, to benefit from the economic opportunities offered by the communications revolution. By assessing the changing relationship between the role of the state, economic structures and technological innovation, this research investigates these processes in the UK and Germany. Both countries have the two key public service systems but also feature striking differences such as the antithetic political systems and democratic processes (majoritarian vs. consensus democracy). The basic assumption suggests that a genuine understanding of contemporary developments is only possible if political/economic as well as historic/sociological perspectives are incorporated into the holistic approach applied. Thereby this study gives consideration to key processes and events which have determined transitions between communications policy paradigms and regulatory regimes. Given the Anglo-Saxon tradition of regulating, key processes and events in the UK are often indicated by the appointment and report of a committee of enquiry. For the purpose of this study the most crucial of these is the Committee on Financing the BBC (1986), which first applied market-driven politics onto British broadcasting, and whose recommendations still serve as a blueprint for current communications policy-making. In Germany the KtK Report (1974) formed the basis for decisive reforms in broadcasting and communications. Apart from that, however, Germany features the characteristic of administering state interventions in as detailed a manner as possible through legislation. Of central importance are, therefore, the rulings of the Federal Constitutional Court, which continuously set decisive parameters for the development of the broadcasting system. The thesis follows two driving themes which have been identified as crucial in terms of the comparative dimension and are elaborated continuously in more detail. First, the focus is on the interdependencies between public and private sector. Second, implications and responses of the central vis-à-vis federal characteristic of state formation are investigated. In doing so, the thesis draws on vast sources of archival documents as well as exclusive material from a series of elite interviews with a purposively-selected sample of very high-level sources, including Chairmen, Director-Generals, ministers, very senior civil servants and so on. The thesis demonstrates how communications policy-making is carried out in both countries and how these processes are determined by national regulatory frameworks which are rooted within the borders of the nation state. As such the research findings have broader implications for commercial and public sector regulation.