“Networked” Revolutions? ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes

Abstract

Despite the wealth of research linking Internet-based communication technologies (ICTs) with the rise of anti-government demonstrations in non-democracies, empirical evidence on the impact of ICTs on protest remains inconclusive. Using data from the sixth-wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), I test the relationship between ICT use and protest in non-democracies, finding that although Internet use helps to explain protest participation, organizational networks remain crucial for mobilizing protesters, even in the digital age. Notably, I find that active membership in formal organizations (i.e., attending meetings, holding leadership positions, etc.) significantly increases the likelihood of individual protest participation, providing members with the skills necessary for political engagement and connections to a sustained flow of information about protest events. Most important, I find significant interactive effects between organizational membership and ICT use—while Internet use increases the likelihood of protest engagement for all individuals, the effects of ICT use are greatest for multiply-engaged citizens who are actively involved in both online and offline organizational networks. This work thus illuminates a largely overlooked symbiosis between online and offline communities and forces a reconsideration of the ways in which organizations work to mobilize contention under authoritarian rule.

Keywords

social movements protest communication technology authoritarian regimes

We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.

—Fawaz Rashed

Alaa is in prison because electronic words scare this government. Nothing more.

—Omar Robert Hamilton

Introduction¹

The above quotes, attributed to activists in Egypt’s January 25th revolution, exemplify the growing influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on politics in non-democracies. ICTs purportedly solve the collective action problem inherent in authoritarian regimes (Kuran 1995)—aided by digital tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and mobile technology, disaffected citizens have been able to mobilize protests on an unprecedented scale, shaking the foundations of long-standing dictatorships in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, and Ukraine. Yet, while commentators have extolled the virtues of digital technologies for political activism, it remains an open question whether ICTs actually promote protest behavior in non-democratic regimes. While some scholars highlight the transformative potential of these media for facilitating communication and strengthening the public sphere (P. N. Howard and Hussain 2011; Little 2016; Shirky 2008; Steinert-Threlkeld 2017), others question the efficacy of digital networks for mobilizing citizens in the absence of face-to-face interactions, and call attention to the ways in which autocrats have used these technologies to scupper opposition communication and manipulate messaging (Gunitsky 2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013).

A key challenge in resolving this debate is the singular focus that most research has placed on ICTs as a means of evaluating collective action in non-democratic settings. Bolstered by recent events in the Arab Spring and beyond, much of the literature on ICTs in authoritarian regimes has centered on assessing the effects, whether positive or negative, that the Internet will have on protest politics (Castells 2012; Earl and Kimport 2011; Morozov 2012; Weidmann and Rød 2019). Yet, while this research is well executed, such narratives obscure the ways in which these media are embedded within existing systems of collective action and bypass important questions about how ICTs interact with extant “organizational forms, models of leadership, ideologies and forms of communication” (Melucci 1996, 4). As evidence from case studies have shown, mobilization through interpersonal social networks has served as an important alternative to mobilizing online in certain cases, while in others, traditional social actors have successfully employed digital media to enhance their own organizational capacities on the ground (Beissinger 2017; Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl 2012; Breuer, Landman and Farquhar 2014; Hassanpour 2014). To fully assess the effects of ICTs on protest then, we need to consider both the independent effects that traditional social networks have on protest mobilization and the potential interactive effects that may exist between online and offline social networks.

Recognizing this, the present article offers an alternative theoretical approach to the study of ICTs and protest in non-democracies, examining how digital media function within the context of a broader organizational sphere—including traditional organizations and face-to-face networks. Using data from the sixth wave of the WVS, I show that while Internet use is a powerful predictor of protest behavior, involvement in voluntary associations plays a far greater role in strengthening citizens’ commitment to protest activity. Specifically, I find that active membership in formal organizations (i.e., attending meetings, holding leadership positions, etc.) significantly increases the likelihood of individual protest participation, providing members with the skills necessary for political engagement and connections to a sustained flow of information about protest events. Most important, my results reveal a surprising symbiosis between Internet use and organizational membership—while Internet use increases the likelihood of protest engagement for all individuals, its mobilizing potential is heavily conditioned by political behaviors developed offline. Indeed, the protest-inducing effects of ICTs are greatest for those that are actively involved in both online and offline organizational networks, resulting in a class of multiply-engaged citizens with the greatest propensity to protest. Thus, my work highlights a possible synergy between digital and traditional social networks, and prompts further examination of the dialectical relationships that may exist between online and offline communities.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the following section, I review the literature on ICTs and protest mobilization, paying specific attention to scholarship that highlights the benefits of ICTs in non-democratic regimes. Within this review, I discuss two limitations of extant research, and, in the next section, present an alternative theory of protest participation that centers on the role of voluntary associations in mobilizing contentious action. In the third section, I outline the research design, data, and methods, and discuss the ways in which I operationalize key variables. In the fourth section, I present the results of the main analyses, which are afterwards subjected to a number of robustness checks. Specifically, I address several potential threats to causal inference and present additional empirics which show that the results are robust to a number of alternative specifications. Finally, in the last section, I conclude by elaborating on the interplay between virtual and associational networks for mobilizing collective action, and offer new directions for future research.

ICTs and Protest Mobilization: An Unclear Relationship

Although studies of ICT use in non-democracies represent a relatively new frontier in political science research,² there is mounting evidence that ICTs are reshaping politics in authoritarian regimes. Previous studies have shown that digital technologies foster more liberal media environments (Diamond and Plattner 2012), broaden the public sphere (Benkler et al. 2015; Shirky 2011), increase government accountability (Khazeli and Stockemer 2013), and strengthen political participation in non-democratic regimes (Breuer and Groshek 2014; Tufecki and Wilson 2012). More recently, the Internet’s prominent role in the diffusion of protest in Eastern Europe, Hong Kong, and the Middle East has stimulated new discussions on the role of ICTs for mobilizing anti-regime contention and influencing processes of democratization more broadly (Aday et al. 2010; Brym et al. 2014; Reuter and Szakonyi 2015; Rujikrok 2017). By some accounts, the proliferation of digital media has spawned a new era for opposition activists, in which dictators can be overthrown with the stroke of a computer key or the use of mobile phones, YouTube, and social networking sites (P. N. Howard and Hussain 2011; Shirky 2008).

Focusing on the relationship between ICTs and protest specifically, scholars argue that digital technologies serve as a catalyst for protest given their advantages in facilitating community and connectivity in non-democratic regimes. As many-to-many technologies, ICTs permit frequent, decentralized communication on an unprecedented scale, reducing the costs of mobilization and enabling protest movements to quickly reach critical mass (Enikopolov, Makarin, and Petrova 2020; Little 2016; Steinert-Threlkeld 2017).³ At the same time, the Internet’s horizontal network structure allows for the maintenance of multiple communication streams with a diverse network of people, providing citizens with more and more varied channels of information about protest events, even when they are not necessarily seeking it out (Boase et al. 2006; Clark and Kocak 2020; Walgrave et al. 2011). From a sociological perspective, ICTs such as Twitter and Facebook promote the development of group identities, interpersonal trust, and social capital among users, creating the type of “virtual communities” that are key antecedents of protest behavior (Rheingold 1993; Steinfeld, Ellison, and Lampe 2008). Finally, within authoritarian regimes specifically, digital technologies may help citizens overcome informational problems that typically keep aggrieved citizens at home. In addition to publicizing grievances and exposing government weakness (Manacorda and Tesei 2020), ICTs may also reduce fears of repression by providing visual evidence that opposition to the regime is “large, committed and cohesive” or by discouraging the use of more violent government responses (D. Christensen and Garfias 2018; McGarty et al. 2013, 10).

However, cyber skeptics have downplayed the salutatory effects of ICTs on protest, arguing that such technologies are marginal and even detrimental to processes of contentious action. Recent work by Hassanpour (2014) and Wolfsfield, Segev, and Sheafer (2013), for example, reveals that while much of the initial activism in Egypt’s January 25th movement was coordinated online, the movement’s ultimate dispersion and revolutionary character can be attributed to the strength of face-to-face networks. Moreover, the growth of digital media may exhibit a negative effect on protest mobilization in non-democratic regimes, as tech-savvy autocrats discover new ways to manipulate and control information online. As Deibert et al. (2008) and others note, Internet censorship techniques in autocracies have become increasingly varied over time, evolving from denial-of-service tactics used in North Korea and Iran to more sophisticated methods like “just-in-time” filtering and targeted content control popularized in China (Deibert et al. 2008; Roberts 2019). At the same time, autocrats may use ICTs more subtly to uphold the political status quo through the strategic appropriation of these technologies for their own ends (Gunitsky 2015; Rød and Weidmann 2015; Weidmann and Rød 2019). As numerous studies have shown, dictators have routinely adopted ICTs to bolster their support, using them to anticipate citizen grievances (King et al. 2013), discredit political opposition (MacKinnon 2012; Rundle 2011), and strengthen government legitimacy through the distribution of propaganda and norms (King et al. 2017; Stockmann and Gallagher 2011; Warren 2014).

Theory: Bringing Organizations Back In

While the current discussion regarding the relationship between ICTs and protest is important, I argue that is also limited in ways that prevent scholars from fully appreciating the impact of ICTs in non-democracies and the causes of political change more broadly. To date, few studies have analyzed the effects of ICTs in concert with other forms of organizing, or considered the ways in which these media interact with existing systems of collective action (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl 2012; Pavan 2014). In particular, the literature’s primary focus on digital technologies has obscured the role that organizations have played in mobilizing protests, and has overlooked the ways in which traditional offline actors have substituted for, and in some cases, complemented, online organizing.

Indeed, in the canonical literature on protest, organizations are a critical mobilizing structure that amass resources and motivate individuals to take collective action (Olson 1965; Zald and McCarthy 1987). In repressive settings, voluntary associations facilitate participation in contentious activity by providing access to information about protests through channels closed to non-members, particularly in contexts where traditional channels of information may be censored or state-owned (Verlhust and Walgrave 2009). At the micro-level, organizations foster the development of collective identities and dense interpersonal ties necessary for recruitment into activism (Diani and McAdam 2003; McAdam 1982; Verlhust and van Laer 2008). Given the right set of opportunities, citizens can appropriate existing social networks within churches, unions, or recreational associations and transform them into instruments of contention (Ekiert and Kubik 2001; McAdam 1982; Trejo 2012).

Beyond their role in facilitating recruitment, organizations also encourage protest behavior by providing members with the skills, resources, and networks of trust necessary for political mobilization. Following De Tocqueville, voluntary associations can serve as “schools of democracy” where participants can gain leadership skills, experience with collective decision-making, and a sense of personal efficacy that translates into broader engagement in politics (Pollock 1982; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Relatedly, movement organizations may also enhance mobilization by socializing members to political issues and providing frames which re-define members’ collective identities in accordance with movement goals (Benford and Snow 2000; Passy 2001; Snow 2013). Finally, as research by Putnam (2000) highlights, the social-capital enhancing features of associational membership lead to increased levels of interpersonal trust and cooperation between group members, reducing common barriers to collective action seen in non-democracies (Kuran 1995).

An important theoretical aspect of these arguments is the direct experiences that members have in the functioning of groups. Scholarship on the variable effects of organizational membership on political participation, for example, casts doubt on the relevance of passive or “checkbook” membership on protest behavior (Cigler and Joslyn 2002; Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003; Sobieraj and White 2004). As organizations pursue increasingly flexible forms of engagement that do not require that members actually “show up,” but rather pay dues or sign up for mailing lists, citizens receive fewer opportunities to engage in community activities or join in the internal democracy of the group, thus undermining the positive effects of political socialization associated with more active forms of membership (M. Howard and Gilbert 2008). Most important, in the absence of face-to-face interaction among members, passive forms of membership fail to create the social capital necessary for collective action—as Putnam notes of the relationship between passive members, “Their ties, in short are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another” (Putnam 1995, 71). Thus, in line with the above literature, I expect that active organizational membership will be a significant determinant of protest behavior in non-democracies, even when accounting for the presence of ICTs.

Online and Offline Networks: Substitutes or Complements?

Yet, beyond supporting the consensus that membership in associations should positively impact individuals’ protest behavior, I argue that the effects of organizational membership may vary in the presence of alternative mediums, such as ICTs, that can also mobilize citizens into political action. While the majority of the literature examines the mobilization potential of off- and online networks separately, a newer body of research has highlighted the utility of examining the relationship between these mobilization channels (Kahne and Bowyer 2018; Nugent and Berman 2018). Currently, extant scholarship offers two contrasting perspectives on the relationship between digital media and organizational membership that are helpful for theorizing their effects on protest. On the one hand, ICTs may operate as a substitute for voluntary associations. At its most optimistic, this conceptualization sees online and offline networks as parallel avenues for mobilization, with digital media activating specific demographic groups, such as tech-savvy youths, who are often marginalized within traditional mobilizing groups (Nam 2012). Yet, at its most pessimistic, this approach casts digital and organizational networks as duplicate and competing forms of mobilization, whose effects serve to counteract the other. Most notably, proponents of the “slacktivism” perspective warn that forms of online activity may distract from real-world activism by enabling citizens to achieve a sense of self-efficacy while choosing to forego civic participation on the ground (H. Christensen 2011; Gladwell 2010; Morozov 2012).

On the other hand, digital networks may serve as complements to offline organizing, mobilizing individuals into protest in concert with traditional associations. As Putnam (2000) highlights,

it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that the question before us is computer-mediated communication versus face-to-face interaction. Both the history of the telephone and early evidence on Internet usage strongly suggest that computer-mediated communication will complement, not replace, face-to-face communities. (Putnam 2000, 179)

Indeed, as the work of Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl (2012) and Beissinger (2017) makes clear, mobilization via ICTs and formal organizations are not mutually exclusive conditions—as traditional organizations have realized the utility of digital media for facilitating activist engagement, these tools have been creatively appropriated by organization leaders to enrich membership networks and provide alternative methods through which activists can contribute to social movement goals. Moreover, online media may synergistically enhance the mobilizing power of organizations by enabling members to communicate protest information to a broader audience, creating a supra-network of multiply-engaged citizens that are capable of extremely efficient mobilization (Castells 2012; Nugent and Berman 2018; Walgrave et al. 2011). At the same time, the ability to interact with others via organizational channels may help to strengthen the “weak ties” developed by movement participants online, as it is in these settings where users feel bonds of trust and interpersonal networks are better established (Stolle and Rochon 1998). As Tufecki (2017) notes of the blogging community in Tunisia, yearly conferences held by the NGO Global Voices helped foster dialogue and social capital between atomized bloggers, enabling authors of the parenting, tourism, and political blogs to unite more easily against the threat of government repression once protests against the Ben Ali regime broke out. In this sense then, digital and conventional organizing should have a symbiotic relationship, due to the tendency of the Internet to strengthen and reinforce participatory behaviors developed offline (and vice versa).

Drawing on insights from these diverse perspectives, the succeeding analysis tests four distinct arguments regarding the relationship between protest, organizational membership and ICT use. First, following the vast literature on ICTs and protest mobilization, I examine the relationship between protest mobilization ICT use, anticipating a positive association between one’s frequency of Internet use and their likelihood of protest (H₁). Second, building on the traditional literature on collective action, I consider the effects that organizational membership has on an individual’s protest behavior, with the expectation that active organizational members should be more likely to protest than passive members and Internet users, ceteris paribus (H₂). Finally, I examine the interactive effects that ICT use and organizational membership have on protest mobilization, testing two alternative theories of the relationship between online and offline networks. In specific, I test whether virtual and associational networks function as substitutes—such that the positive effects of Internet use on protest are greater for non-members than it they for individuals belonging to formal organizations (substitution thesis, H_3a)—or whether they function as strategic complements—such that organizational members who use the Internet more frequently face the greatest likelihood of protest (reinforcement thesis, H_3b).

Data and Methods

To test these arguments, I utilize data from the sixth wave of the WVS (2010–2014).⁴ Considering the dearth of micro-level comparative datasets on protest and the breadth of topics covered in the WVS—including multiple questions on protest, media consumption, and associational life—this dataset is well suited to operationalize the concepts of interest in this study. The analyses focus on a subset of fifteen countries⁵ classified as “non-democracies,” based on their receipt of a score of five or below on the POLITY IV scale of regime types. The decision to focus on these countries was driven by the vast literature which suggests that digital technologies are especially influential in non-democratic states, where information may flow less freely and the costs of collective action are significantly increased (Rujikrok 2017; Stein 2017; Tarrow 1998). Furthermore, given the limitations they place on political participation and organization, non-democratic regimes are an especially rigorous test case for the argument that membership in voluntary associations mobilize citizens into contentious action. After subsetting the data to focus on these cases and removing missing data, responses for 19,630 individuals were included in the final analysis.

Dependent Variable

Collective Protest

The outcome of interest, participation in protest, is measured using a binary indicator of whether an individual has participated in a protest, strike, or peaceful demonstration in the past year.⁶ In so doing, I deliberately exclude “cheaper” forms of political engagement, such as petition-signing and boycotts that have been shown to be less costly for citizens and motivated by different sets of concerns (McAdam 1986; Petersen 2002; Siegel 2009). Although focusing on “high risk” protest undoubtedly provides a harder test case for identifying the impact of ICTs on mobilization, it is precisely with this type of protest in mind that the benefits of digital technology are called into question (Gladwell 2010). Thus, it is necessary to exclude boycotts and petitions from our definition of protest and focus specifically on strikes, public demonstrations, and the like. Based on this operationalization, roughly 12 percent (N = 2238) of respondents in the survey sample participated in protest.

Independent Variables

ICT Use

The digital mobilization argument outlined above suggests that individuals with more frequent access to information and communication technologies should have a higher likelihood of engaging in protest activity. To test this hypothesis, I examine survey items on media consumption available in the WVS which measure the regularity with which respondents use and engage with ICTs. Because comprehensive information on the full range of ICTs is unavailable in the original survey, I focus on Internet usage as a general proxy for all media previously discussed, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the blogosphere. Specifically, I measure Internet use in two distinct ways. First, using responses from a question in the WVS that asked individuals how often they used the Internet to obtain information about their country and the world, I classify Internet usage on a five-point scale: daily (21%), weekly (10%), monthly (6%), less than monthly (7%), or never (56%). Second, following Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur (2015), I dichotomize these responses into two categories, separating those who used the Internet on at least a weekly basis (31% of the sample) from those whose Internet use was more infrequent (69% of the sample).

Organizational Membership

My proposed alternative to the digital mobilization hypothesis posits that networks developed within formal organizations, such as civil society groups and political parties, are the primary drivers of protest participation. To test this argument, I rely on a series of questions available in the WVS regarding individuals’ membership in a variety of civic and political associations. In separate questions, respondents were asked to indicate the extensiveness of their involvement in eleven different voluntary associations. From this data, a single, trichotomized measure of organizational membership was created that distinguished non-members from those reporting passive membership in an organization, and from those holding at least one active organizational membership. Based on this categorization, 58 percent of respondents reported holding no membership in voluntary groups, while 14 percent were classified as passive group members and 28 percent were categorized as active group members.

Covariates

Grievances and Motivations

In addition to the measures outlined above, I also consider grievances and individual motivations, such as political interest, as potential determinants of protest behavior. Classical theories of political mobilization have long argued that protest activity is stimulated by the need to express one’s grievances, stemming from economic deprivation, frustration, or perceived injustices. Specifically, grievances associated with economic loss and lack of privilege have been shown to generate “mobilizing emotions” such as anger and disgust which strengthen support for activist causes and increase individual willingness to participate in protest activity (Bergstrand 2014; Bernburg 2015).

To test this theory, I include two measures of individual grievance. First, to capture the effect that grievances based upon economic deprivation have on protest behavior, I include a measure of financial satisfaction based on responses to the following question: “How satisfied are you with the financial situation of your household?.” Furthermore, to assess the role that broader perceptions of grievance play in motivating protest, I include a measure of individuals’ overall life satisfaction. In line with the extant literature on grievances and contention, higher levels of grievance (indicated by more negative responses) are expected to positively influence the likelihood of individual participation in protest.

In addition to personal grievances, individual motivations—such as political interest—are expected to play a central role in explaining protest participation. According to Putnam (2000, 35), political interest and knowledge are “critical preconditions for active forms of involvement,” serving as a proxy for citizens’ level of political consciousness and, consequently, their willingness to engage in contentious action. In this study, measures for political interest are derived from answers to the following question in the WVS, “How interested would you say you are in politics,” with responses coded as a Likert scale from 4 (very interested) to 1 (not at all interested). As with the above measure of grievance, I expect higher levels of political interest and knowledge to be positively correlated with an individual’s propensity to mobilize for protest.

Demographic Covariates

Finally, each of my models include a number of demographic controls. Previous students of protest have pointed to a variety of individual characteristics as significant determinants of protest behavior. Research by Kaase and Marsh (1979), for example, found that people who were younger, better educated, and male were more inclined to engage in protest than those who were not. Subsequent studies have shown that women have become more likely to protest than men (Marien, Hooghe, and Quintelier 2010) and that students and the employed are more likely to join protest than others (Schussman and Soule 2005). Thus, to account for individual difference in the propensity to protest, control variables were included for survey respondents’ age, gender, marital status, education, religiosity, employment status and income.

Method

Using the data described above, I estimate a series of logistic regressions to evaluate the linkages between protest, Internet use, and organizational membership. I run three different specifications of the main model: first with no controls, second with controls for grievances, motivations and demographic characteristics, and finally with controls and an interaction between Internet use and organizational membership to assess the multiplicative effects that formal organization and ICT use have on the likelihood of protest participation. The regression equations for the main models (specifications 2 and 3) are as follows:

(1) Protest = β₀ + β₁Internet Use + β₂Org. Membership + β₃X + β₄Z + •

(2) Protest = β₀ + β₁Internet Use + β₂Org. Membership + β₃Internet Use*Org. Membership + β₄X + β₅Z + •

where Internet Use is a binary measure of one’s frequency of Internet usage, Org. Membership is the indicator of membership in a formal organization, X is a vector of grievance and motivation variables, and Z is a vector of demographic controls.

Because I am interested in exploring cross-national trends in protest participation, I analyze surveys from the fifteen countries under observation in a pooled format. To adjust for unequal sample sizes across countries, proportion weights included in the WVS are used in the estimation of each model. Additionally, to account for potential correlation between respondents within a single country, country fixed-effects and country-clustered standard errors are included in all regressions. Finally, for robustness, I estimate two alternative specifications of the models—a propensity-score matching analysis (to account for selection bias) and a multilevel model—and perform a number of sensitivity tests to address issues of concept definition and measurement (results available in online appendix).

Results

Figure 1 presents the coefficient estimates—depicted as log-odds—from the regression models described above.⁷ As is evident, I find strong and consistent support for the hypothesis that organizational membership is a critical facilitator of protest, even in the digital age. While frequent Internet use is positively and significantly correlated with protest participation—increasing the likelihood of protesting by roughly sixty-one percent—the substantive effect of organizational membership is considerably greater across all model specifications. As shown in Figure 2, all else equal, passive organization members who use the Internet infrequently are twenty percent more likely to engage in protest than frequent Internet users, while for active members, this difference increases to nearly sixty percent. Moreover, in comparison to non-members, individuals who actively participate in organizations are 2.6 times more likely to engage in protest activity, a difference which is significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

Figure 1.

Determinants of individual protest participation.

Figure 2.

Predicted probability of participating in protest by Internet use and intensity of organizational involvement.

Ultimately, this finding challenges narratives which characterize contemporary protests in autocracies as “Twitter” and “Facebook” revolutions, and instead, highlights the continued importance of formal organizations for mobilizing contention. As qualitative studies have shown, in cases such as Egypt, Ukraine, and Sudan, voluntary associations have played a critical role in organizing protests, with groups ranging from soccer clubs to trade unions providing the institutional infrastructure necessary to mobilize disaffected citizens and sustain otherwise loosely structured protest campaigns (Beinin 2013; Dorsey 2012; Hassan and Kadouda 2019; Onuch 2015). In line with these studies, my findings highlight the enduring relevance of organizations for facilitating collective action in the contemporary age. As the above results demonstrate, offline networks remain critical agents of protest mobilization, even as digital technologies are enhancing opportunities for political participation.

Moreover, I find that several other traditional explanations of protest remain significant for predicting contention in the Internet age. Consistent with motivation based theories, I find strong evidence that political interest increases one’s likelihood of protest participation. As the results from Model 2 show, individuals who report being “very” interested in politics are roughly 38 percent more likely to report participating in protest than those who are “somewhat” interested, an effect which is significant at the 99 percent confidence level. Additionally, age, education, and employment status are also strongly associated with protest participation, with those that are younger, male, more highly educated, and employed being more likely to engage in protest than their counterparts. However, contrary to expectations, I find only mixed support for hypotheses relating grievances and feelings of economic frustration with higher levels of protest. Indeed, while measures of life satisfaction are both negatively and significantly associated with the act of engaging in protest, measures of financial satisfaction appear to have no significant relationship with protest participation.

Organizational Membership and Internet Use: Mobilizing in Competition or Cooperation?

Yet, while this set of findings answers some questions, it also raises new ones. Specifically, given the considerable literature which highlights the functional similarity between ICTs and traditional organizations, it is worth investigating how these mobilization channels operate in interaction with one another. Do virtual and associational channels serve as complements, enabling multiply-engaged individuals to be mobilized more effectively into contentious action? Or alternatively, is a substitution effect operative, whereby Internet use reduces the effect of individuals’ organizational ties on their protest behavior? To test this hypothesis, Model 3 includes an interactive term which captures the multiplicative effects that organizational membership and Internet use have on the likelihood of participating in protest. As the results from Figure 1 show, the effects of Internet use are heterogenous across levels of organizational involvement—for active members the coefficient for the interaction term is positively signed and significant, while for passive members the coefficient is negatively signed and fails to meet convention levels of significance (p = .27). To aid in the interpretation of this result, Figure 3 plots the predicted probability of protest as a function of Internet use and membership status, holding all other variables constant. As is evident, the participation-inducing effects of Internet are strongly conditioned by intensity of organizational involvement, with the greatest benefits accruing to those that are actively involved in formal organizations. All else equal, an active organizational member that uses the Internet on a weekly basis is almost twice as likely to participate in protest than one that uses the Internet on a less than weekly basis, an effect which is significant at the 95 percent confidence level. By contrast for passive organizational members, the marginal effect of Internet use on protest is lower (.0183) and is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Hence, while Internet use generally tends to increase the likelihood of protest participation, it appears that both cyber-optimists and cyber-skeptics may be right; for those more actively involved in offline organizations, Internet use complements the existence of pre-existing networks to significantly increase the likelihood of protesting (reinforcement effect), while for those who are less involved in offline communities, ICTs have a relatively neutral effect on participation in contentious activity.

Figure 3.

The interactive effects of ICTs and organizational membership on protest behavior.

Similarly, an examination of the marginal effects of organizational membership on protest also demonstrates wide variation across levels of Internet use. Several interesting patterns emerge. First, in line with H₂, membership in organizations—whether passive or active—increases the likelihood of protest for all individuals regardless of their frequency of Internet use. However, reflecting a reinforcement logic (H_3a), the marginal effect of organizational membership is greatest for those who use the Internet on a more regular basis. In effect, the “participatory gap” between non-members and passive members is 17 percent larger for frequent Internet users than it is for infrequent users, while the corresponding gap between non-members and active members across similar levels of Internet use is nearly double (.039 versus .078). Moreover, while the difference between passive and active members’ likelihood of protest is insignificant at low levels of Internet use, for frequent users this difference is significant and substantively large (4.4 percentage points). This finding thus challenges the notion that on- and offline networks operate in competition, and instead demonstrates the various ways in which online networks mirror and reinforce those developed offline (Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2010; Schradie 2018; van Laer 2010). Thus, in line with the findings of Bimber, Castells and others, I find support for the existence of a complementary relationship between on- and offline communities, wherein digital and associational mediums constitute reciprocal modes of engagement whose effects strengthen and support one another.

Robustness Checks

To verify the robustness my results, I conduct a number of sensitivity tests to address issues of model specification. The online appendix replicates the results in Figure 1 under three different modeling choices: (1) with standard errors clustered by province, (2) with Internet use coded as an ordinal variable, and (3) with an alternative sample focusing specifically on countries classified as autocratic regimes (POLITY scores less than 0).⁸ With each of these alternative specifications, the substantive results of the analyses remain unchanged. In all models, Internet use and organizational membership (both passive and active) are significant at the 99 percent confidence level, with active members of organizations being slightly more likely to engage in protest than frequent Internet users. Additionally, measures of political interest and demographic characteristics (education, gender, age, employment status) continue to be relevant predictors of protest participation. Most important, the main result of the previous analyses—that the effects of organizational membership on protest vary by frequency of Internet use (and vice versa)—continues to hold when Internet use is operationalized as an ordinal measure. Again, the positive and significant coefficient for the interaction between Internet use and active membership indicates that the protest-inducing effects of the Internet are highest for individuals who are actively engaged in associational networks. Whereas for passive members, the increase in protest likelihood when moving from zero to daily Internet use is only slight (.038 to .055), for active members this effect is nearly three times as great (.039 to .086). Significantly, this result is robust to the adoption of more flexible parametric assumptions that allow for the modeling of non-linear interaction effects (Hainmueller, Mummolo, and Xu. 2019; Figure 3A), inspiring further confidence in the existence of strategic complementarities between Internet use and organizational membership.

In addition to issues of model specification, I also address the possibility of spuriousness in my previous results. A key challenge for estimating causal effects in observational settings is the problem of self-selection—that is, the possibility that individuals may select into certain behaviors, such that unobservable factors could be influencing both participation in a given behavior (i.e., organizational membership or frequent Internet use) and the outcome of interest (protest). Already, a wide body of research has pointed to issues of selection bias in studies of organizational membership and political participation; there is ample reason to believe that those most likely to join organizations are also the most likely to engage in political activism due to their increased structural and biographical availability for extracurricular commitments (Armingeon 2006; McFarland and Thomas 2006; van der Meer and Van Ingen 2009). At the same time, the use of Internet technology may also be self-selective if individuals with higher socio-economic status are more able to afford ICTs and, subsequently, have more discretionary resources to commit to offline activism. In this case, systematic differences among comparison groups may confound the estimation of causal effects, because those most likely to join organizations or engage online may be respondents who were already predisposed to protesting (due to differing levels of political interest, for example).

To address this concern, I employ recent innovations in propensity score estimation to generate covariate balanced propensity scores⁹ for each individual in the sample, using demographic and behavioral characteristics to account for individual differences between respondents. Following methods described in Dong (2015), I combine measures of Internet use and organizational membership into one multinomial “treatment” with six levels, and estimate inverse probability of treatment weights (IPTWs; based on the propensity score) for each using the WeightIt package in R. I generate inverse weights by modeling treatment as a function of key covariates known to affect both Internet use/organizational membership and protest,¹⁰ based on a review of extant literature. After confirming balance between treatment and control groups (Figure 4A), I use IPTWs to construct a synthetic sample in which the distribution of measured baseline covariates is independent of treatment assignment—approximating a randomized control trial—and re-estimate the models in Figure 1.

Table 7A presents the results of the propensity-weighted analysis, estimating the likelihood of protest among each of the treatment groups (rows 2–5) relative to the control (no organizational membership/infrequent Internet use). As can be seen, the results mirror those presented in the main analysis above. While Internet use and organizational membership increase one’s likelihood of protest individually in comparison to the baseline, the greatest increase is observed among those who are at the interstice of virtual and associational networks. Again, active organizational members who use the Internet frequently are the most likely to engage in protest, facing twice and three times greater likelihood of protest than exclusively active organization members or frequent Internet users, respectively (Figure 5A). These results thus boost my confidence in a causal interpretation of the findings from the main analyses above, and provide robust evidence of a complementary relationship between online and offline channels for political mobilization.

Finally, I consider the possibility that the effects of Internet use on protest may vary within different institutional settings. As recent work by Weidmann and Rød (2019) suggests, digital technologies function differently depending on the political context in which they are embedded. In particular, if dictators view ICTs as an alternative means through which they can exercise social control, the protest inducing/reducing effects of the Internet should be higher in countries with greater associational freedoms, since digital media in these settings substitute for more traditional forms of repression. Alternatively, if autocrats use ICTs alongside traditional means of control, the protest suppressing effects of the Internet should be particularly high in countries where repression is prevalent, that is, where freedom of association is low.

To probe the existence of these conditional relationships, I estimate a multi-level model with a cross-level interaction between individual Internet use and associational rights, using country as a grouping variable. To account for possible heterogeneity in the relationship between Internet and protest across country cases, random intercepts are included in the estimation of each model. As in the previous analyses, I estimate three main models: one without controls, one with controls for grievances, motivations and demographic characteristics, and one with controls and an interaction between Internet use and organizational membership.

Table 8A presents the results of the multi-level analysis, with coefficients reported as log-odds. As with the previous models, the key results of the main analysis remain unchanged. In all models, Internet use and organizational membership are positively and significantly associated with protest participation, and the effect of Internet use on protest is highly conditioned by membership status. Surprisingly, however, there appears to be no significant conditional relationship between Internet use and the strength of associational rights in a given country. While Internet use and the degree of associational freedoms have strong independent effects on protest, the coefficient on the interaction term between Internet use and associational rights is not statistically significantly different from zero (p = .66). Thus, the multilevel analyses do not provide compelling evidence that the effects of ICTs on protest vary across institutional contexts; rather, the facilitating effects of digital technology appear similar within closed and open autocracies (Figure 7A).

Summary

In sum, my results provide robust and consistent support for the majority of the theoretical expectations outlined above. As predicted by the vast literature on ICTs and protest, Internet use is positively and significantly related to protest participation. However, in line with the classic literature on collective action, membership in formal organizations continues to exert significant effects on protest, even when controlling for the presence of ICTs. Most notably, I find evidence of a strong interactive relationship between Internet use and organizational membership, wherein those that are most likely to protest are also those who are actively engaged in social networks both on and offline. Indeed, in contrast to the slacktivism literature, I find that ICTs do not detract from traditional channels of mobilization; rather for those most actively involved in organizations, online networks amplify and reinforce political behaviors developed offline. Thus, my results reveal a surprising synergy between digital and associational networks and echo a growing literature which highlights the symbiosis between formal organizations and ICTs (Beissinger 2017; Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl 2012; Valenzuela et al. 2016).

Conclusion

This article addresses the ongoing debate about the effects of ICTs on protest by examining how such technologies contribute to protest behavior in non-democratic regimes. While numerous studies have highlighted the benefits and dangers of digital media for organizing collective action, very few have focused on non-democracies and even fewer have considered the ways in which these technologies coexisted with and contended against traditional agents of mobilization such as civil society networks and political organizations. Using survey data on protest in non-democracies from the WVS, I investigate the impact of Internet technology on protest in comparison with more traditional “offline” networks, uncovering novel complementarities between “old” and “new” channels of political mobilization. I find that while digital media and associational networks exert strong independent effects on protest, they also interact powerfully with one another, profoundly affecting the likelihood of protest engagement.

Like most contemporary scholars, I argue that research on digital media must go beyond conventional binaries which starkly counterpose techno-utopians against those more skeptical of technology’s promise. Instead, to understand the true influence of ICTs on protest, a more nuanced and qualified version of the digital mobilization argument must be advanced. The above findings show that technology can have a positive impact on individual protest behavior, but, this effect is likely mediated through social actors that exist both on- and offline. Across a wide range of empirical models, I find that participation in formal organizations has substantive and significant effects on the probability of protest, demonstrating that even in the digital age, offline social networks remain a powerful channel of mobilization. However, the most striking conclusion of this research is that ICTs and organizations are reciprocal and complementary channels for mobilization whose effects mirror and strengthen one another. Indeed, challenging the outsized role attributed to digital technologies in “revolutionizing” protest mobilization, I find that ICTs do not supplant traditional organizations; rather they interact with offline networks to produce individuals with the greatest propensity to protest. Ultimately, such potential for symbiosis points to the persistent need for scholars studying ICTs to contextualize these media within their larger political environment and consider the ways in which digital technologies overlap and interact with interact with traditional social actors.

Finally, it is important to stress that the methodological approach taken by this study should be considered a first step in a larger effort to strengthen the analytical rigor of research on ICTs and protest dynamics. While the survey data presented here enables me to assess the extent to which exposure to digital media influenced individual protest behavior across a diverse set of non-democratic regimes, it does not allow me to ascertain precisely how these media were used nor in which ways they proved influential. Yet if we wish to develop a true causal story about the relationship between ICTs and protest mobilization, addressing these questions are critical, and will require more fine grained data about the media themselves and about the types of activists that utilize them. As “big data” from sources such as Facebook and Twitter become more accessible, the potential for studies to investigate these topics increases significantly. However, in keeping with the aim to contextualize ICTs within their larger political environment, I emphasize that quantitative analyses must be complemented by theoretical and qualitative work which carefully considers the ways in which new media interact with a system of pre-existing actors, behaviors, and political opportunities.

Undoubtedly, such research will prove daunting given the turbulent environments which characterize the cases in which protest dynamics are most likely to be explored. Yet, in facing these challenges, future scholars will create new opportunities for the field, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which ICTs can be used to facilitate political engagement and support mobilization efforts.

Supplemental Material

online_appendix_pdf – Supplemental material for “Networked” Revolutions?: ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes

Supplemental material, online_appendix_pdf for “Networked” Revolutions?: ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes by Ashley Anderson in Political Research Quarterly

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Melani Cammett, Evelyne Huber, Mai Hassan, Frank Baumgartner, Issac Unah, Gary Marks, Graeme Robertson, Neil Ketchley, Christopher Clark, Charles Kurzman, Andy Andrews, Lucy Martin, Marc Hetherington, Rebecca Kreitzer, and three anonymous reviewers for their varied forms of support in the execution of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ashley Anderson

Supplemental Material

Supplemental materials for this article are available with the manuscript on the Political Research Quarterly (PRQ) website.

Notes

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Supplementary Material

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“Networked” Revolutions? ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction 1

ICTs and Protest Mobilization: An Unclear Relationship

Theory: Bringing Organizations Back In

Online and Offline Networks: Substitutes or Complements?

Data and Methods

Dependent Variable

Collective Protest

Independent Variables

ICT Use

Organizational Membership

Covariates

Grievances and Motivations

Demographic Covariates

Method

Results

Organizational Membership and Internet Use: Mobilizing in Competition or Cooperation?

Robustness Checks

Summary

Conclusion

Supplemental Material

online_appendix_pdf – Supplemental material for “Networked” Revolutions?: ICTs and Protest Mobilization in Non-Democratic Regimes

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Supplemental Material

Notes

References

Supplementary Material

Introduction¹