SEMINAR CANCELLED Riot Networks: Theory and an Application to Processes of Social Unrest in Latin America

We analyze protest participation as a binary choice model in a communication network to coordinate actions. Both, the formation of links in the network as well as the action choices and beliefs about the support in the population are endogenous. We provide a complete characterization of the equilibrium action choices, beliefs and networks, where agents choose their strategies (actions and links) according to a perturbed best response update process, and update their beliefs following De Groot’s rule. We show that a threshold exists in the linking cost and the conformity parameter such that all agents coordinate on the same action. Further, we find that the introduction of incomplete information via beliefs lowers the threshold (i.e.
makes protests more likely). Moreover, we show how the theoretical model can be efficiently estimated using cross sectional data on agents’ choices and their network of interactions from Twitter data for two large scale protests in Latin America. Our estimation results further show that both, the local peer effect and the global conformity effect, are significant in explaining protest participation. Joint with Chih-Sheng Hsieh, Gizem Korkmaz, and Michael D. König.

Key words: collective action, networks, riots, protests
JEL: D74, D72, D71, D83, C72

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