Information and communication technologies as drivers of social unrest
Martha Garcia -Murillo Marcio Wohlers (State Mo inul Zaber (Carnegie Mellon (Syracuse University) University of Campinas – University doctoral student) UNICAMP) Martha Garcia-Murillo is a political economist interested in impact of technology in a country's economy and institutions. I am also interested in the manner in which laws and regulations affect technological development.
Marcio Wohlers: is an economist interested in regulation, economics of ICT and development. I am also interested in science & tecnology, innovation and globalization.
Monioul Zaber: is doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University with interest in statistic analysis of development issues
ABSTRAC
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) is reducing the transaction costs of information gathering and distribution. This can be, and has shown to be, a powerful tool for citizens that need to organize to protest against what they may perceive as social injustice. In fact this century has seen much more tangibly the manner in which these technologies facilitated, to a certain extent, The Arab Spring and the Occupy movements. Using ICT we expect to understand that the relationships of political stability with the following variables: a) poverty: b) education and corruption c) and freedom of expression.
Introduction
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reducing the transaction costs of information gathering and distribution as well as enhance the emotional connections that they have towards the problems they face. ICTs can thus be a powerful tool for citizens to protest against what they may perceive to be unjust. This century has seen much more tangibly the manner in which these technologies facilitated, to a certain extent, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements.
In this paper we review the literature to determine the factors that can lead to political stability and using data from the World Bank and other international organizations we construct a model to empirically determine if information technologies specifically mobile and Internet access lead to greater social unrest.
In addition to ICTs we include four additional control factors that pervious scholars identify as contributors to a society’s need to protest. These were: economic factors (income per capita and poverty), education, corruption and freedom of expression.
Explaining social unrest
Many scholars have studied social unrest and have tested different hypothesis that try to elucidate the causes of these movements. In this paper we focus specifically on the role of ICTs but need to take into consideration prior work to adequately model our empirical model. 1
According to Jovanović, Renn, and Schröter (2012) social unrest is an expression of collective dissatisfaction where the intensity of the protest depends on the extent of the level and nature of social discontent. Pappas and O’Malley (2014) identifies four groups of causes that can lead people to take to the streets to express their dissatisfaction. These are: economic; cultural; socio-ideological and state related.
There are examples in the literature that support Jovanović, Renn, and Schröter’s definition. In 1993 for example in Argentina government employees riot and burned three government buildings as well as the houses of local politicians and government officers. Scholars who studied the event found that government employees had not been paid in more than three months, instances of corruption, nepotism and police repression that led to “psychological states of indignation, frustration and/or resentment” (Auyero, 2003, p. 121). More recently we have seen countless examples in Tunisia and in Egypt during the Arab Spring as well as the Indignados movement in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street in the US. According to Castells (2013) social change involves an individual or collective action that have an emotional motivation as showed by social neuroscientist. The main emotions involved in social change are fear that result in precautionary behaviors such as withdrawal and anger, which acts as a trigger to action. To overcome fear is necessary to build a protected space in which the individual does not feel isolated. In other words there are the emotional poles that push individuals towards action and subsequently these emotions can evolve into collective action.
In his Networks of Outrage and Hope book Castells (2013) highlights ten characteristics of the social movement particularly in the Internet age. They are listed as follows: (i) the movements are networked using the Internet and wireless devices that allow for mass self-communication with powerful images; (ii) these are horizontal networks that create the fellowship that helps to overcome fear and find hope while facilitating and encouraging cooperation; (iii) the movements are triggered by a spark of outrage in a spontaneous manner; (iv) the movements become viral due to the easy dissemination of information on the internet which is reinforced by the demonstration effect of other social events; (v) the conversion of indignation to an autonomous entity usually happens through decisions taken in a space of autonomy; (vi) they are self-reflexive and learning movements that constantly questioning what they want, and the governance structure that can help them avoid the pitfalls of failed movements; (vii) generally they are nonviolent movements. However they tend to occupy public spaces to pressure the political authorities and business representatives and do not recognize a fair participation in institutional spaces; (ix) the movements rarely have a focus, except in cases of fight against dictatorial regimes. There are many and varied demands in order not to produce an organization or leadership because the agreements depends from their collective decisions and a detailed protest plans and (x) the movements intend to transform the State but not radically change it. The movement articulate feelings, stimulate debate but do not create parties. They design a new utopia of the democracy; a networked democracy based on local and virtual communities in constant interaction. There is recognition that utopias are the roots of political systems such as liberalism, socialism and communism. However the movement proposes the utopia of autonomy of the individual in relation to institutions of society. It is clear that research about social movements point to two key elements that prompt people to get involved one is the dissatisfaction that they feel about a situation and the emotional connection that may prompt them to act. We believe that information and communication technologies, as explained below, can also reduce transactions costs making those two other factors more salient.
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The role of ICTs in helping citizens get organized
Previous generations faced challenges when trying to make policy changes or changes in government. These citizens did not have the tools necessary to find and share information about abuses of power, for example. They did not have the means to coordinate their efforts against perceived injustices. ICTs have, however, improved information and access because of a reduction in transactions costs. In fact, recent studies suggest that social media which is made possible by ICTs may have contributed to the Arab Spring (Ghannam, 2011). Although there is also some evidence that these technologies are not sufficient to lead to social unrests (Dewey, Kaden, Marks, Matsushima, & Zhu, 2012). We thus expect that the relationships of political stability with poverty, education, corruption and freedom of expression may lead to greater instability as people can more easily organize. From an economic perspective this will mean a shift upward in the relationships between ICTs and protests as these become are more widely accessible to the population.
The literature about protest has found that individuals are relatively slow to response to the problems they face. There is therefore a delay between the problem and the reaction from the citizens. Scholars have modeled this move from a passive state when civil society is not engaged to an active state that can involve street protests for example. This swift from passive to active is shown in figure 1 and it represents the delay or reluctance that people show before they decide to get involved. F1 is the point at which they are no longer satisfied with the problematic situation they are facing and decide to act. They remain active until things get better at point F2 when is no longer justified or necessary to remain active.
Source: (Scheffer, Westley, & Brock, 2003)
In this paper we are only concern with the first part of the sigmoidal curve as we are mainly interested in the factors that lead a society to move from passive to active from idle to protest in the presence of perceived economic of political problems. In this respect we believe that ICTs may thus shorten the time 3 and frequency that people wait to get organized. Hysteresis, which is the tendency to remain constant in spite of changes in the environment reflects the delay that we see in societies before they are willing to get engaged more visibly when faced with a problem. We may thus find that ICTs reduce hysteresis meaning this tendency to maintain their status quo due to the ease at which people get to know about a problem.
We know from experimental research in psychology that people are highly influenced in their actions by the actions of others. In situations such as calls for help in emergency situations people will help depending on how the people around them get engaged. They may in fact engaged as much as their peers even if their own individual assessment of the gravity of the situation does not quite justify such level of participation (Latane & Darley, 1968). In another experiment (Asch, 1955) participants choose the wrong answer in more than a third of the time to a question about the length of drawn lines when their peers, accomplice to the researchers, also choose the wrong question.
It is clear that knowing what others are doing will thus influence a person’s behavior as well. Before ICTs were more widely available it would have taken much longer for a person to know what a fellow citizen was feeling. Today the public has many tools to communicate with people they don’t know. With a few keystrokes a person can easily share information on practically any topic or event. Mobile phones for example allow people to connect to others through tweets and Facebook postings, for example. On the internet they can find blogs and with a broadband connection they can access videos.
We may thus find that the inertia (hysteresis) may be eased by people getting to know through these technologies that there are many peers as dissatisfied as themselves. While current data does not allow us to test for this, it is possible that a problem that is not actually very significant may seem much bigger and result in action simply because people found about it and pass it to others to such extent that they decided then to act. Such “premature action” may have not been possible in a world with no ICTs as the amount of people necessary to make such judgment of “many people” may take significant longer to discover.
ICTs as a communication resource affect people perceptions due to the reduction in transaction costs. Transaction costs include searching , which in the case of protests it means both information about a problem and people who may have similar negative perception about it. Monitoring , which for social unrest to happen is about the amount of people who may also feel discontent about a specific problem. In the past people needed to dedicate time and resources looking for information that had been spread through means such as radio, TV, newspapers and word of mouth. Today it is much easier to due to the fact that people can simply subscribe to a news, follow tweets or facebook posts and read it at their leisure. This cursory awareness is in fact a form of monitoring that takes little effort. Coordination is another factor that has significantly changed with the spread of ICTs. In this respect we make an important distinction, not done in the literature before. We divide ICTs into coordination and information technologies with cell phones being primarily a coordination tool and internet primarily an information tool. Because cell phones can only convey relatively short messages people can quickly get organized to attend an event, for example, using social media tools as well as cell phone messages. However if they need more in-depth information about an issue they will find it more comfortable doing it through a broadband connection with a larger screen that allows them to navigate to multiple sources.
Information technologies, with their ability to reduce transaction costs also allow leaders to be found much faster. An opinion leader who finds an audience can quickly acquire a large number of followers
4 through likes and the spreading o f the leader’s site. These leaders as Scheffer et al. (2003) indicate can precipitate a rapid shift in opinion
In addition to the manner in which ICTs contribute to facilitate protests, these technologies also expand human emotions. In this respect Castells (2013) states that social movemen ts take place in varied socie ties with different cultures and diverse institutio nal practices basic human emotions have been found to be at work using cognitive process in the social neuroscience field. The Inter net and wireless communications, he believes, are basic technologies that enable horizontal networks that feed movements in their local and global dimensions. The Internet and the wireless networks produce enthusiasm that strengthens social mobilization intentionally. It is the Internet, he argues, that turns these untreated re sponses into movements of political importance . As the central factor in this study we thus wish to test the following hypothesis:
H1: ICTS is likely to increase social unrest
While we are interested in the role of ICTs , it would be unrealistic to ignore o ther factors that can also contribute to the emergence of these movements. Because of that our econometric analysis includes economic factors, political factors specifically corruption and freedom of expression as control elements that can contribute to a society’s need to protest.
Other factors
Social unrests are not an isolated phenomenon therefore we need to take into consideration other factors that can lead to this type of events. Because of that we feel compelled to include in our empirical analysis o ther factors found in the literature and describe below. Figure 1 presents a picture of these.
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Economic factors
In 1970 Gurr publish his book Why men rebel where he argues that when people are negatively affected by economic factors such as a general economic recession or specific measures people experience feelings of deprivation that can lead to frustrations and thus aggression.
Economic causes such as depressions and crisis that lead to austerity measures can negatively affect employment opportunities and wages. Other scholars (Bohlken & Sergenti, 2010; Brandt & Ulfelder, 2011) also found that a country is likely to experience social unrest when their economic growth is slow while the contrary is true when their economy is growing. A similar type of result was found among European countries where instances of social unrest increased when public spending as a percentage of GDP decreased almost doubling their probability when these cuts reach a 5% of GDP.
The 2008 “great recession” lead to citizens’ protest. In some countries these continue for months while in others they dissipated relatively quickly. In the U.S. and the U.K. for example, Roberts (2013) explains people cease their manifestations of discontent due to the quantitative easing that limited the extent to which the recession could have affected them.
Roubini (2011) warned about the social unrest coming from inadequate economic policy. For instance firms cutting jobs because of inadequate demand generates excess capacity that result in cutting jobs This individually rational decision of one firm is destructive to society at large.
Justino’s (2005) research found a correlation between social unrests and reduced of economic growth. She argues that frequent episodes of civil unrest significantly reduces the potential for economic growth and poverty reduction. In a short civil unrest can lead to the poverty. However it is also true that poverty induces civil unrest. The magnitude of recent social and political instability across many developing countries has brought social conflict into the forefront of modern development economics. In his book "The End of Protest - How Free-Market Capitalism Learned to Control Dissent" Roberts (2013) presents an analysis of the factors that lead to social protest. He states that unrest is an intrinsic part of the free-market model, a problem identified early by thinkers like Polany and Schumpeter. These authors Roberts (2013) states have noted the natural tendency of loosely regulated markets to create discontent. However in the United State or England unrest emerged but not to the extent expected during the great recession, considered the worst economic crisis in a generation. The reason is that these countries have developed new methods that have been able to reconcile the neoliberal disdain for democratic politics with the immediate need to avert a total economic police.
In the 19 th century politics was routinely shaped by mass action of citizens, in the form of strikes, demonstrations, marches and riots. Presently the transformation of crowds into mass action depends of the effectiveness of democratic institutions to give expression to public frustration about the economy (Roberts, 2013). One of the aims of the protesters since the financial crises has been to point out the ways in which the democratic process has itself been undermined during the neoliberal age and to denounce that democratic institutions have been captured by well-heeled interests. In others words, the institutions that are supposed to function as the vehicle for responding to public discontent have been hobbled so that they cannot do this properly.
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Social movements do not begins only because the social inequalities or political despair. They also require an emotional mobilization triggered by outrage and hopes of a possible change. They are fueled by successful movements in other parts of the world which had been spread by the Internet. The riot in Argentina also happen to have occurred in Santiago del Estero where almost a third of the population at the time was unable to satisfied basic needs. It had the lowest income level and the lowest life expectancy (Auyero, 2003). When the population is living with incomes at or below the poverty line it is reasonable to expect that they, feeling pressure, will protest to influence the government to change their circumstances (Alesina & Perotti, 1996). They have nothing to lose when they decide to demonstrate and potentially even engage in acts of terrorism (Abadie, 2006). As their income increases they are now busy with theirl ives and, being a bit more satisfied, they may be more reluctant to protest, leading to greater political stability. We should thus expect that as income increases so should stability. We will thus test the following hypothesis:
H2: Social unrest exhibits a concave relationship with income.
Education
As with poverty, when people are less educated they are more likely to be manipulated by governments through what is known in sociology as co-optative politics and empowerment by the state where the “the mob plays (along) with the capture machine (or the state)” (Duno-Gottberg, 2015). Unable to assess the validity of their government’s claims they have little reason to complain and this will result in a relatively stable socio-politico environment. As people become more educated hey are also more likely to become aware of the injustices and will thus more likely to protest, leading to more unrest and instability. In Abernethy and Coombe (1965) words “The expansion of education contributes directly towards instability because it generates demands upon the political system which that system is unable to meet.”
Smith’s (2011) analysis the relationship between education and civil unrest in forty two Sub-Saharan African countries from 1997-2010 finds that an increase in higher level education (calculated by university enrollment) increases the possibility of civil unrest conflicts. However the model also demonstrates that increases in higher level education together with an increased GDP growth rate decreases civil unrest. Educated individuals are less likely to protest because economic expansion provides economic opportunities.
Another study that looked at factors that result in social unrest is Hall, Rodeghier, and Useem (1986) analysis of 22 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors using geographic information systems with demographic and health surveys found that conflict onsets are more likely in regions with (1) low levels of education; (2) strong relative deprivation of household assets; (3) strong intraregional inequalities; and (4) combined presence of natural resources and relative deprivation. Given this research we are likely to see a negative linear relationship between education and social unrest. During a transition towards a more educated society there is greater likelihood for social unrest, though at some point education and income will improve sufficiently to result in greater social stability. Regarding the role of regulation we will test the following hypothesis.
H2: Social unrest exhibits a concave relationship with education.
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Governance and Corruption
There is of course a close link between good governance—the efficient and effective state which is open, transparent and accountable to the population (Theobald, 2002)—and corruption. Corruption is per se is not the problem but the effects it has on poverty which can in turn push citizens to the streets calling for the prosecution of corrupt behavior.
Corruption is a factor that can have potentially two effects in the likelihood of protests. On one hand it can be a powerful motivating factor that can lead people to protest when they realized how badly corruption is affecting their country and them personally. For example poorly paid or even unpaid government employees can force some of them to take advantage of their positions in government to “sell favors” for government services and even more serious offences such as the sale of weapons to drug cartels or the approval of lucrative public work contracts for example. The main concern is when money is moved away from the economy and to support the provision of public services to the hands of a public officials.
Given the benefits that corrupt activities can bring to those involve, those involved either in the public or private sector will try limit protest, resist any change and simply put in place cosmetic solutions that get the population to think that something is being done while, in reality, the problem persist. In addition given the personal benefits that these individuals receive and the power they hold they can delay or block changes in government (Magee, 1989).
Samples from many countries provides evidence of the potential link between social unrest and instances of corruption. In China for example Sun (1991) attributes to corruption the 1989 protests in Beijing. Also in China Chen (2000) attributes labor protests to managerial corruption in state enterprises that systematically eroded salaries and subjected workers to coercive labor controls. Similarly Lippman (2014) explains how protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina that resulted in several torched government buildings could be traced to pervasive corruption in the country and in India the case of Anna Hazare who began a protest fast (an ultimately died) against corruption was the starting point for the Hazare movement that resulted in protests in many sectors of the economy.
In this paper we thus test the following hypothesis
H3: The higher the levels of corruption in a country the higher the instances of social unrest.
Freedom of expression
As stated by Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992) in any democracy the media should provide citizens with a coherence sense of what is happening in the country.
In countries where there is little freedom of expression we are likely to see more stability. This can happen because the population is not being told everything that is happening in the country and may be unaware of abuses of power. There are several instances where governments have tried to control the press to limit discontent. In 2015 for example president Maduro of Venezuela who, in addition to cracking down on protesters he has made it difficult for comedians, who often make political jokes, to get venues to perform (Block, 2015).
As a government allows for greater freedoms, people who had been unable to express themselves are likely to engage in greater speech and this leads to greater instability. Studies in this areas find that a positive relationship between civil liberties and to increased citizen’s voice asking for greater government accountability (Isham, Kaufmann, & Pritchett, 1997). 8
The extent to which people are free to express themselves will also contribute to the likelihood that a society will be willing to engage in protest. There are two ways in which a free (or not) press affects participation. In the presence of limited mobile phones or internet, it is mass media what allows people to get to know current events. Both diversity and freedom from government intervention can affect the manner in which events are perceived by the public. When the press is controlled by government or when the private sector is severely limited to publish or air whatever they want it limits citizens ability to become aware or get accurate information about the socio-economic and political environment. Political leaders and authorities can influence social perception through the stories they tell the public. They can also create public campaigns that misinform or downplay the severity of a problem to the public (Scheffer et al., 2003). The effect on the likelihood of protest thus depends on two elements the extent to which the public believes those stories and the likelihood of being sectioned by authorities if they protest.
A free press thus contributes to the information finding piece of the transaction costs that entail getting organized for a protest. Given the evidence on this area we expect that
H4: Political stability is likely to exhibit a convex relationship with freedom of expression.
Methods
Data Description
Using data from the World Bank and other international organizations we assemble a panel data that tests the impact of ICTs on political stability through the income, education, corruption and freedom of expression variables, in order to see if these variables have made governments more or less stable.
To analyze the data, we used a panel dataset encompassing of 110 countries from 2005-2012. The dataset is unique in nature as it has been made by merging data from various sources (see appendix 2 for summary statistics), such as:
• World Bank database which provided us data on GDP per capita, education, law and order and population. • International Social Science Resource, produced by Witold J. Henisz, who constructed the The Political Constraint Index Dataset (POLCON III), ,where POLCON = 0 means minimum constraint or most hazardous political environment, and POLCON = 1 means maximum constraint or most stable political environment. The Political Constraint Index Dataset (POLCON) is an attempt to measure political constraint, that is, to recognize underlying political structures and measure their ability to support credible policy commitments • International Telecommunication Union, where data on ICT, such as mobile subscription are available . • University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne which provides the dependent variable, protest, which represents a weighted conflict index taken from its Civil Unrest Data. [http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/data/speed/ ].
Table 1 hosts the regression result of the panel logistic regression conducted on the variable protest.
The general model for the estimation is given below:
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