The loss of local newspapers in the US is understood to be a challenge for a functioning democracy. Relying on a theoretical framework drawn from political geography, this article explores “news deserts” and related concerns about news media saturation in large cities, using newspaper employment and a typology of 15 US county-types to better understand shifts in the US’ newspaper industry.

Legacies of an authoritarian past still leave enduring effects on voters’ political attitudes and behavior. I argue that authoritarian nostalgia is a defining factor in voter attitudes and related behavior in post-authoritarian democracies. Voters who share core values from the authoritarian past construct heightened social identity toward the past, which breeds strong attachment to authoritarian legacy parties.

How does an authoritarian past shape voters’ left-right orientation? Recent studies investigated “anti-dictator bias” in political ideology that citizens of a former right-wing (left-wing) dictatorship may display a leftist (rightist) bias in their ideological self-identification. I argue “pro-dictator bias” that citizens may hold ideological positions corresponding to those of the dictator based on three reasons: first, successors of a former dictator may still dominate politics in some countries with inherited political resources from the past; second, not all former dictators are evaluated negatively and even attract positive evaluation based on their performance, evoking authoritarian nostalgia; and third, the political environment that shaped former dictators’ ideological position may persist under the new regime, prolonging the ideology’s relevance.

What explains the lack of electoral consequences for corrupt politicians? Building on studies of motivated reasoning and asymmetric partisan bias, this paper highlights the importance of partisan differences in how voters interpret corruption charges and make voting decisions. I contend that in post-authoritarian democracies, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties (ALPs) are less likely to punish corrupt copartisan incumbents compared to supporters of other parties faced with equally corrupt copartisan incumbents.

This paper examines the connection between declines in local journalism in the US and the possibility of declines in federal prosecutions for public corruption, defined by the US Department of Justice as crimes involving the abuse of public trust by government by federal, state, and local public officials. Journalism has long been presumed to serve as a check on the powerful, shedding light on wrongdoing; however, given the significant declines in local newspaper journalism in the US, extant theory suggests that wrongdoing such as public corruption would be less visible to the public–and in turn, make it more difficult for these abuses to come to light so they can be prosecuted by the US government.