Protests by the young and digitally restless: the means, motives, and opportunities of anti-government demonstrations

Abstract

Inspired by the recent wave of global protests, this paper seeks to empirically investigate the role and interaction of a burgeoning young population and the penetration of information and communications technology (ICT) in explaining the onset and diffusion of anti-government demonstrations. Employing a cross-national global analysis between the years 1995 and 2011, we find that youth bulges and ICT affect protest activities in a more complicated and nuanced manner than the conventional wisdom suggests. The proliferation of anti-government protests is multiplicatively heightened when the enhanced technological means of protest are fused with the structural and opportunity-based conditions often witnessed in countries with large youth bulges. In contrast, we do not find that either of our variables of interest affects the probability of the outbreak of protests, which is rather explained by more contextual factors. A nuance in our results pertaining to the prevalence of protests suggests that it is the proliferation of technology that is more important than demographic factors. This suggests that those communication mediums, more likely to be used by younger generations, have worked to successfully amplify calls for mobilization even when those cohorts are otherwise smaller in size.

Keywords:

• ICTs
• politics
• social movements
• young people

Notes on contributors

Adrian U. Ang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University. [email: [email protected]]

Shlomi Dinar is Associate Director for Academics in the School of International and Public Affairs and Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. [email: [email protected]]

Russell E. Lucas is director of the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities program and an Associate Professor of Arab Studies at Michigan State University. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Following Banks and Wilson (2013), we define a demonstration as any peaceful public gathering of at least 100 persons whose primary purpose is to voice or display their opposition to government policies or authority.

2. For descriptive statistics, please see Table A1.

3. See Figure A1.

4. See Figure A2.

5. See Figure A3.

6. See Figures A4 and A5.

7. See Figure A6.

8. We recognize that the Freedom House indices are not without controversy (see e.g. Munck & Verkuilen, 2002) and hence we also used the Polity IV Index (Marshall, Gurr, & Jaggers, 2013). This did not substantively alter our findings and we chose to report the Freedom House indices because they generated fewer missing values. The Freedom House indices and the Polity IV Index correlate at r = −.89 (p < .01).

9. We do not believe that the use of per capita GDP to measure both economic growth and development is an issue, either methodologically or conceptually. Per capita GDP is a valid measure of economic development and multicollinearity is not an issue as the two variables correlate at r = .22 (p < .01). Please see Table A2 for the full correlation matrix. We also recognize that ‘development’ is a multi-faceted concept and we believe that our other control variables such as the dependency ratio and per capita university enrollment account for other aspects of development.

10. Our results are robust even when year dummies are excluded.

11. The first stage of the ZINB model – the inflation equation – estimates the probability of being in the ‘always zero’ group (i.e. the variables predict the likelihood of being in the ‘never experienced’ anti-government demonstrations group) in order to estimate the causal factors in the onset of protests. In the inflation equation, a negative sign means that the variable reduces the likelihood of being in the ‘always zero’ group. However, for the purpose of presentation and ease in interpreting the results we invert the signs such that positive signs are indicative of factors that are likely to lead to the occurrence of at least one anti-government protest event.

12. To address this question, we utilize the second stage of the ZINB model – the count equation, which estimates an answer to the question that given that at least one anti-government demonstration occurred in a country, what is the expected number of demonstrations?