How Digital Communication Technologies Shape Protest
Open Access
Author:
Teufel, Brendan
Area of Honors:
Political Science
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Joseph Wright, Thesis Supervisor Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
protest campaign success onset
Abstract:
Why do some protests succeed while others fail? Updated technology used for communication seems like it would help a protest have a higher chance of success, but governments possessing this ability as well could severely quell protests. In the end, I contend that with the added help of communication technologies higher levels of communication technologies lead to a higher rate of protest success. While protest success occurs in two parts, protest onset and actual success of the protest once it has begun, I hypothesize that higher levels of communication technologies lead to a higher rate of success in both of these categories. I test these hypotheses by looking at 384 protests in 165 countries during the time period 2000-2013. I run three regressions for protest onset and two regressions for protest success to test my hypotheses. I account for government digital capacity, government digital repression, population size, mobile phone penetration, and government repression in these regressions. I find support that citizen’s use of communication technology before protests helps protest onset, while elite’s usage of communication technology after the protest has already begun helps lead to the actual protest’s success.