A spatial analysis of the impact of West German television on protest mobilization during the East German revolution

Abstract

Formal models of revolutionary collective action suggest that ‘informational cascades’ play a crucial role in overcoming collective action problems. These models highlight how information about the aggregate level of participation in collective action conveys information about others’ political preferences, and how such informational cues allow potential participants to update their beliefs about the value of participating in antiregime collective action. In authoritarian regimes, foreign mass media are often the only credible source of information about antiregime protests. However, limited robust evidence exists on whether foreign media can indeed serve as a coordination device for collective action. This article makes use of a detailed dataset on protest events during the 1989 East German revolution and exploits the fact that West German television broadcasts could be received in most but not all parts of East Germany. Across a wide range of Cox proportional hazards models and conditional on a rich set of observables, it finds that the availability of West German television did not affect the probability of protest events occurring. The evidence presented here does not support the widely accepted ‘fact’ that West German television served as a coordination device for antiregime protests during the East German revolution. More broadly, it also calls into question strong claims about the effects of communication technology on revolutionary collective action.