Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests

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.

Slacktivism

“…Lohmann (1993), Banerjee and Somanathan (2001), and Battaglini and Benabou (2003) model costly participation in a population of finite size. Battaglini (2017) and Battaglini et al (2020) model participation as costless. Ekmekci and Lauermann (2019) analyse both setups.…”

Petitions, Political Participation, and Government Responsiveness

“…Finally, petitions and protests are useful to policy makers because they are a channel through which citizens can convey private information about optimal policy. Battaglini, Morton and Patacchini (2021) theoretically and experimentally evaluate how the informational value of a petition depends on connectivity (information sharing properties) within social groups (see also Battaglini (2017)). 9 Our results suggest that threshold rules such as the one in the uk system generate more information for decision makers by increasing citizen participation in protest.…”

“…2 Petitions are widely regarded as an important form of protest as a means to influence political decision makers and even predate elections as democratic institutions in many countries. For theoretical and empirical evidence on the importance of petitions and protests see, e.g., Battaglini, Morton and Patacchini (2021); Enikolopov, Makarin and Petrova (2020); Battaglini (2017); Cantoni et al (2019); Manacorda and Tesei (2020).…”

Hidden hostility: donor attention and political violence

“…Other relevant literatures are the ones on drivers of protests(Kricheli, Livne, and Magaloni 2011;Barbera and Jackson 2016;Passarelli and Tabellini 2017;Battaglini, Morton, and Patacchini 2020), economics of conflict(Rohner and Thoenig 2021;Anderton and Brauer 2021;Rohner 2022), and impact of foreign aid(Collier and Hoeffler 2002;Easterly 2003;Sachs 2006;De Ree and Nillesen 2009;Nunn and Qian 2014).…”