Media, Development, and Institutional Change investigates mass media s profound ability to affect institutional change and economic development. The authors use the tools of economics to illuminate the media s role in enabling and inhibiting political economic reforms that promote development. The book explores how media can constrain government, how governments manipulate media to entrench their power, and how private and public media ownership affects a country s ability to prosper. The authors identify specific media-related policies governments of underdeveloped countries should adopt if they want to grow. They illustrate why media freedom is a critical ingredient in the recipe of economic development and why even the best-intentioned state involvement in media is more likely to slow prosperity than to enhance it. Scholars and students of economics, political science and sociology; policy-makers, analysts and others in the development community; and academics in media studies will find this book insightful and provocative.

‘Institutional Change and Economic Development’ discusses not just theoretical issues but a diverse range of real-life institutions – political, bureaucratic, fiscal, financial, corporate, legal, social and industrial – in the context of dozens of countries across time and space, spanning Britain, Switzerland and the USA in the past to Botswana, Brazil, and China today.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

Developing countries commonly adopt reforms to improve their governments yet they usually fail to produce more functional and effective governments. Andrews argues that reforms often fail to make governments better because they are introduced as signals to gain short-term support. These signals introduce unrealistic best practices that do not fit developing country contexts and are not considered relevant by implementing agents. The result is a set of new forms that do not function. However, there are realistic solutions emerging from institutional reforms in some developing countries. Lessons from these experiences suggest that reform limits, although challenging to adopt, can be overcome by focusing change on problem solving through an incremental process that involves multiple agents.

"The essential role institutions play in understanding economic development has long been recognised and has been closely studied across the social sciences but some of the most high profile work has been done by economists many of whom are included in this collection covering a wide range of topics including the relationship between institutions and growth, educational systems, the role of the media and the intersection between traditional systems of patronage and political institutions. Each chapter covers the frontier research in its area and points to new areas of research and is the product of extensive workshopping and editing. The editors have also written an excellent introduction which brings together the key themes of the handbook. The list of contributors is stellar (Steven Durlauf, Throsten Beck, Bob Allen,and includes a diverse mix of Western and non Western, male and female scholars)"

"Examines organization, leadership and changes within Mexico's historic pro-democratic opposition parties, the Partido Acción Nacional and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática. Explores the implications for overall party organization and the future of Mexico's democratic experiment"--Provided by publisher.

Are homecoming games and freshman composition, Twitter feeds and scholarly monographs really mortal enemies? Media U presents a provocative rethinking of the development of American higher education centered on the insight that universities are media institutions. Tracing over a century of media history and the academy, Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx argue that the fundamental goal of the American research university has been to cultivate audiences and convince them of its value. Media U shows how universities have appropriated new media technologies to convey their message about higher education, the aims of research, and campus life. The need to create an audience stamps each of the university’s steadily proliferating disciplines, shapes its structure, and determines its division of labor. Cooper and Marx examine how the research university has sought to inform publics and convince them of its value to American society, from the rise of football and Great Books programs in the early twentieth century through a midcentury communications complex linking big science, New Criticism, and design, from the co-option of 1960s student activist media through the early-twenty-first-century reception of MOOCs and the latest promises of technological disruption. The book considers the ways in which universities have used media platforms to reconcile national commitments to equal opportunity with corporate capitalism as well as the vexed relationship of democracy and hierarchy. By exploring how media engagement brought the American university into being and continues to shape academic labor, Media U presents essential questions and resources for reimagining the university and confronting its future.