Agenda building and the politics of regime legitimacy in East Africa

Abstract

This study examines how the governments of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania influence public attitudes to legitimise their regimes through the media. It is based on a survey of 1 395 citizens in 15 provinces of East Africa, who were selected using a stratified multistage cluster sampling. Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) estimated whether government influence on public attitudes towards regime legitimacy vary between users of state-owned and privately owned media, while accounting for education levels. Government influence on public attitudes towards regime legitimacy had a negative influence within provinces and had no significant positive influence across provinces when education levels were high. But the data show that those governments build their political influence by taking advantage of citizens who are less educated and lack a basic understanding of their political rights.