Working Paper: NBER ID: w26757
Authors: Marco Battaglini; Rebecca B. Morton; Eleonora Patacchini
Abstract: We present an informational theory of public protests, according to which public protests allow citizens to aggregate privately dispersed information and signal it to the policy maker. The model predicts that information sharing of signals within social groups can facilitate information aggregation when the social groups are sufficiently large even when it is not predicted with individual signals. We use experiments in the laboratory and on Amazon Mechanical Turk to test these predictions. We find that information sharing in social groups significantly affects citizens' protest decisions and as a consequence mitigates the effects of high conflict, leading to greater efficiency in policy makers' choices. Our experiments highlight that social media can play an important role in protests beyond simply a way in which citizens can coordinate their actions; and indeed that the information aggregation and the coordination motives behind public protests are intimately connected and cannot be conceptually separated.
Keywords: public protests; information sharing; social media; policy outcomes
JEL Codes: D72; D78
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| information sharing (O36) | protest decisions (D70) |
| protest decisions (D70) | policy outcomes (D78) |
| information sharing (O36) | policy outcomes (D78) |
| high conflict (D74) | reduced informativeness of protests (D72) |
| reduced informativeness of protests (D72) | less attention from policymakers (H59) |
| high conflict (D74) | less attention from policymakers (H59) |
| social media use (Z13) | increased information sharing (O36) |
| increased information sharing (O36) | more effective protests (D72) |
| social media use (Z13) | more effective protests (D72) |