A spatial analysis of the impact of West German television on protest mobilization during the East German revolution

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.革命性集体行动的形式化模型表明，信息级联（informational cascades）在破解集体行动困境中发挥着关键作用。这类模型阐释了：集体行动的参与总规模相关信息，如何传递出他人政治偏好的信号，以及此类信息线索如何让潜在参与者更新自身对参与反政权集体行动的价值判断。在威权政权中，境外大众媒体往往是获取反政权抗议活动信息的唯一可信信源。然而，目前关于境外媒体能否切实充当集体行动协调工具的可靠实证证据仍较为有限。 本文采用了一套涵盖1989年东德革命期间抗议事件的详细数据集，并利用了西德电视信号在东德大部分地区（而非全部区域）可被接收这一自然实验条件。在控制了多组丰富观测变量的前提下，通过一系列Cox比例风险模型（Cox proportional hazards models）的分析，本文发现：西德电视信号的可接收性并未对抗议事件的发生概率产生显著影响。本文所呈现的实证结果，并不支持“西德电视曾作为东德革命期间反政权抗议的协调工具”这一广为流传的“定论”。更广泛而言，本研究也对“通信技术对革命性集体行动具有显著影响”这类强主张提出了质疑。