Page 148 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Pippa Norris

THE IMPACT OF MEDIA SYSTEMS ON GOOD GOVERNANCE
AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

What is the impact of this pattern on good governance and human
development? Recent years have seen growing attempts to gauge and
measure systematic, valid, and reliable indicators of political develop-
ment and the quality of democracy in a wide range of countries world-
wide. We can draw on a recent study for the World Bank (Kaufman et al.
1999) that developed subjective perceptions of indicators of good gover-
nance, drawing on multiple surveys of experts, that assessed four dimen-
sionsbasedonthecriteriaofpoliticalstability,theruleoflaw,government
efficiency and levels of corruption (see the Technical Appendix for de-
tails). Political stability is important as this reflects the regular rotation of
government office, consolidation of the “rules of the game,” continuity
in constitutional practices, and lack of political violence due to acts of
terrorism.Theruleoflawconcernstheindependenceandeffectivenessof
the judiciary and courts, perceptions of violent or nonviolent crime, and
the enforceability of contracts. Government efficiency is gauged by per-
ceptions of the quality of the public service and the independence of the
civic service from political pressures. Lastly, perceptions of corruption
reflect the success of a society in developing fair, transparent, and pre-
dictablerulesforsocialandeconomicinteractions.Subjectivejudgments
may prove unreliable for several reasons, including reliance upon a small
number of national “experts,” the use of business leaders and academic
scholars as the basis of the judgments, variations in country coverage by
different indices, and possible bias toward more favorable evaluations of
countries with good economic outcomes. Nevertheless in the absence of
other reliable indicators covering a wide range of nations, such as sur-
veys of public opinion, these measures provide one of the best available
3
gauges of good governance. If widespread access to the free press plays
an important role in promoting government accountability, then this
should be evident in these indicators. Table 6.1 and Figure 6.3 show the
simple correlations among these indicators without any controls. The
results confirm that the indicators of media access, press freedom, and
the combined communications index were all strongly and significantly
related to good governance. Countries where much of the public has
access to the free press have the greater political stability, rule of law,
government efficiency in the policy process, and least corruption.

3
It should be noted that none of the indicators that were selected included measures of
freedom of the press or media access.

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