Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests

Marco Battaglini, Rebecca Morton and Eleonora Patacchini

No 14385, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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; Petitions; Social groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-net and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests (2020)
Working Paper: Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests (2020)
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