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  • June 2020
  • Article
  • Law, Culture and the Humanities

Informing Dissent

By: Hillary Greene and Dennis Yao
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Abstract

The first part of this commentary argues that because the production of dissent depends on the availability of information, greater attention should focus on government restrictions on access to official information. At no time is this more important than when information is monopolized by the government. If not constrained, government’s monopoly control of information, combined with its incentives to shape support for its policies, may at some times and in some ways reduce dissent. In the second part of the commentary, a cost-benefit approach is proposed to analyze an individual’s incentives to produce speech and is then applied to assess the role social communities play vis-à-vis individual dissent. This analysis underscores the important and complex (sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging) role that communities play in the generation of dissent. Our analysis uses economic tools, often accompanied by an antitrust perspective, to better understand the implications of government information control and social pressures upon speech and dissent.

Keywords

Dissent; Information Monopoly; Economics Of Speech; Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA); Self-censorship; Social Pressure; Information; Government and Politics; Spoken Communication; Society

Citation

Greene, Hillary, and Dennis Yao. "Informing Dissent." Law, Culture and the Humanities 16, no. 2 (June 2020): 200–212.
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About The Author

Dennis A. Yao

Strategy
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