ABSTRACT
After defining the political independence of public broadcasters, and restricting the analysis to those national-level public broadcasters operating in democratic regimes, we can now turn to analysing and explaining the degree of political independence that public broadcasters have. I start this chapter by proposing a proxy measure for political independence, based on the turnover of chief executives of these broadcasters. This gives us an indication of which broadcasters are more independent from the government of the day, and which are less so. I then turn to existing explanations of public service broadcaster (PSB) independence, in terms of party-system polarization and bureaucratic partisanship. After indicating why these explanations are unsatisfactory, I then offer my own explanation of PSB independence. I do so by examining the motivations of each actor in turn – politicians, journalists and managers – and suggest that legal protection and the size of the market for news should have positive effects on PSB independence, with the latter factor in turn affecting independence through its consequences for journalistic professionalization and the spread of companies who sell news wholesale: press agencies. Having described both my own explanation and rival explanations, I turn in the last section of this chapter to test these explanations statistically, using data on 36 broadcasters worldwide. I close by discussing the fit of my statistical model of independence, and what it implies for the historical chapters that follow.
