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.

Using Electromagnetic Signal Propagation Models for Radio and Television Broadcasts: An Introduction

“…2015; Crabtree et al. 2015; Durante et al. 2017; Peisakhin and Rozenas 2017; Crabtree, Kern, and Pfaff forthcoming).…”

“…For example, Crabtree et al. (2015) use an area coverage map of East Germany to approximate the signal strength of West German television transmitters across East German counties during the East German revolution.…”

“…When using an indicator variable for media availability we strongly recommend to report a range of estimates across plausible cutoff values (as in Crabtree et al. 2015). Moreover, if at all possible, cutoff values should be based on technical information about the capabilities of receivers in actual use (as in DellaVigna et al.…”

“…For example, Crabtree et al. (2015) use survey data and qualitative information to define a cutoff value for television availability that is known to be conservative and then show that using slightly higher cutoff values does not affect their results.…”

“…Examples of this identification strategy include work on the effects of radio and television consumption on social capital in Indonesia (Olken 2009), the link between hate radio and collective violence in Rwanda (Yanagizawa-Drott 2014), radio’s impact on the rise of the Nazis (Adena et al. 2015), West German television’s role during the East German revolution (Crabtree, Darmofal, and Kern 2015), the effects of Russian television on voting behavior in Ukraine (Peisakhin and Rozenas 2017), and the effects of entertainment television in Italy on votes for populist parties (Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei 2017).…”