Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

degree of centralized order so that social movements challenging existing regimes do not immediately descend into lawlessness; some preexisting political institutions that introduce a modicum of pluralism, such as the traditional political institutions in Botswana, so that broad coalitions can form and endure; and the presence of civil society institutions that can coordinate the demands of the population so that opposition movements can neither be easily crushed by the current elites nor inevitably turn into a vehicle for another group to take control of existing extractive institutions. But many of these factors are historically predetermined and change only slowly. The Brazilian case illustrates how civil society institutions and associated party organizationscan be built from the ground up, but this process is slow, and how successful it can be under different circumstances is not well understood.
    One other actor, or set of actors, can play a transformative role in the process of empowerment: the media. Empowerment of society at large is difficult to coordinate and maintain without widespread information about whether there are economic and political abuses by those in power. We saw in chapter 11 the role of the media in informing the public and coordinating their demands against forces undermining inclusive institutions in the United States. The media can also play a key role in channeling the empowerment of a broad segment of society into more durable political reforms, again as illustrated in our discussion in chapter 11 , particularly in the context of British democratization.
    Pamphlets and books informing and galvanizing people played an important role during the Glorious Revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the march toward democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. Similarly, media, particularly new forms based on advances in information and communication technology, such as Web blogs, anonymous chats, Facebook, and Twitter, played a central role in Iranian opposition against Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent election in 2009 and subsequent repression, and they seem to be playing a similarly central role in the Arab Spring protests that are ongoing as this manuscript is being completed.
    Authoritarian regimes are often aware of the importance of a free media, and do their best to fight it. An extreme illustration of this comes from Alberto Fujimori’s rule in Peru. Though originally democratically elected, Fujimori soon set up a dictatorial regime in Peru, mounting a coup while still in office in 1992. Thereafter, though elections continued, Fujimori built a corrupt regime and ruled through repression and bribery. In this he relied heavily on his right-hand man, Valdimiro Montesinos, who headed the powerful national intelligence service of Peru. Montesinos was an organized man, so he kept good records of how much the administration paid different individuals to buy their loyalty, even videotaping many actual acts of bribery. There was a logic to this. Beyond just recordkeeping, this evidencemade sure that the accomplices were now on record and would be considered as guilty as Fujimori and Montesinos. After the fall of the regime, these records fell into the hands of journalists and authorities. The amounts are revealing about the value of the media to a dictatorship. A Supreme Court judge was worth between $5,000 and $10,000 a month, and politicians in the same or different parties were paid similar amounts. But when it came to newspapers and TV stations, the sums were in the millions. Fujimori and Montesinos paid $9 million on one occasion and more than $10 million on another to control TV stations. They paid more than $1 million to a mainstream newspaper, and to other newspapers they paid any amount between $3,000 and $8,000 per headline. Fujimori and Montesinos thought that controlling the media was much more important than controlling politicians and judges. One of Montesinos’s henchmen, General Bello, summed this up in one of the videos by stating, “If we do not control the television we do not do anything.”
    The current extractive institutions in China are also crucially dependent on Chinese authorities’ control of the media, which, as we have seen, has become frighteningly sophisticated. As a Chinese commentator summarized, “To uphold the leadership of the Party in political reform, three principles must be followed: that the Party controls the armed forces; the Party controls