Europe\u27s Parallel Media Universe: Cross-national analysis of populist media oppression in the EU

This research is to show that populist parties in the European Union attempt to oppress the traditional established media as soon as they come in to power. The multiple regressions test the hypothesis of a negative relationship between the political power of populist parties and degree of media freedom. For the assessment and clarification of the relationship between the level of media freedom and the political power of populist parties, political rights and civil liberties country scores from Freedom House\u27s Freedom in the World reports, GDP per capita from World Bank, corruption perception indexes from Transparency International, and Grigorii V. Golosov\u27s formula of effective number of parties are included as control variables. The proposed hypothesis enjoys empirical support in the context of Eastern Europe and both quantitative and qualitative data demonstrate that populist parties seek to tame the media as soon as they get the power to do so