Malika Talgatova’s “Targeted Media Repression: General Consequences and the Role of Collaborative Networks” studies the effects of repression on journalists’ behavior in Russia. It advances a nuanced argument about how professional coauthorship networks can paradoxically amplify rather than buffer the chilling effects of repression, a claim that cuts against the prevailing optimism about network resilience. Empirically, the paper is exceptional: Talgatova constructs an original dataset of over 300 repressive incidents drawn from four human rights organizations, matches these to a decade of scraped publications across twelve independent Russian media outlets, and deploys a state-of-the-art methodological toolkit including LLM-based content classification, sentiment analysis, and a staggered panel event study design with rigorous robustness checks. The article’s finding that even mild, selective repression produces sustained declines in sensitive reporting, while leaving critical tone largely intact, offers a precise picture of how information environments erode under authoritarianism that may enable better monitoring and advocacy for press freedom.

Hanna Folsz’s “Elite Economic Coercion and Opposition Political Selection in Authoritarian Dominant-Party Regimes” identifies a previously underappreciated strategy of authoritarian control based on targeted economic punishment of opposition candidates and their families. This strategy fills a gap between the well-studied poles of violent repression and elite cooptation in the comparative authoritarianism literature. Folsz implements an ambitious multi-method design, combining a panel dataset tracking the financial performance of over 14,000 candidate-affiliated firms, an original elite survey with embedded conjoint and vignette experiments, and over 90 interviews conducted across ten months of fieldwork. The staggered two-way fixed effects analysis demonstrates that opposition-affiliated firms suffer performance declines following their owner’s political entry, with no comparable pattern for Fidesz candidates or in the pre-autocratization period. The research will be of interest to opposition parties and democracy-support organizations by offering a clear story of why political talent pipelines collapse under autocratization. It points toward actionable strategies including candidate shielding, targeted recruitment of private-sector candidates, and credible coalition-building to counter this dynamic.

Rahmani’s “Media Access, Independent News, and Regime Support: Experimental Evidence from an Autocracy” challenges a foundational assumption in the comparative politics literature that expanding access to independent media necessarily undermines autocratic rule by demonstrating that self-censoring independent newspapers can paradoxically increase regime support. This insight reframes how scholars should think about the relationship between media pluralism and democratization, particularly in high-choice media environments where the relevant counterfactual is not state media but highly critical online sources. The empirical strategy is impressive, combining a sophisticated pre-registered field experiment in Tanzania with a supplemental content analysis of over 23,000 news articles that substantiates the proposed mechanism. The heterogeneous effects analysis showing that pro-regime attitude shifts are concentrated among respondents who would otherwise consume staunchly critical online sources is compelling, despite limited statistical power. For policymakers and media development practitioners, the findings carry an important cautionary message: press freedom interventions that expand access to “moderate” independent outlets may inadvertently divert opposition audiences away from more accountability-oriented sources, with consequences for political mobilization and regime stability.