The Lifecycle of Protests in the Digital Age

Pierre Boyer, Germain Gauthier, Yves Le Yaouanq, Vincent Rollet and Benoît Schmutz-Bloch

No 11257, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We propose a theory of protest dynamics with heterogeneous protest technology and intensity. The ability to mobilize online reduces the likelihood of coordination failures at both the extensive (engagement) and intensive (violence) margins. We build a dynamic coordination game with strategic substitutability and endogenous learning, and use it to characterize a crowd-in-then-crowd-out sequence in which social media initially helps launch massive protests, but then encourages radical factions to turn violent, leading moderates to leave the movement. This sequence is illustrated using online and offline data on the 2018 Yellow Vest uprising in France, whose early success and popularity were abruptly undermined by street violence. First, spatial regressions confirm that online and offline mobilizations reinforced each other at the beginning of the movement. Second, our textual analysis reveals that online conversations among protesters progressively radicalized. Using a decomposition with discussant, page, and period fixed effects, we show that (i) half of this trend was due to changes in the composition of online protesters and (ii) more radicalized pages drove out moderate discussants.

Keywords: protests; learning traps; crowding-out; violence; social media; NLP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 L82 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11257_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Lifecycle of Protests in the Digital Age (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11257

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().