Information Cascades and Revolution
What role can information cascades play in a revolution? How is information used to convince people in a country of turmoil to revolt or stand up for themselves against the government? In a paper by Christopher Ellis and John Fender, they attempt to model these types of questions with the possibility of information cascades in which revolution is synonymous with an information cascade. Furthermore, how it is possible for these cascades to be foundation for mass political protest and rebellion.
In an insecure country, the poor would want to rebel if the state was high but not if the state was low. Furthermore, when a poor person’s belief that the state of nature is high and exceeds some critical probability then their expected is maximized with the anticipation of a successful rebellion. Each of these poor people have the option of engaging in an act of political protest. This occurs sequentially across the entire population of poor people in a country and in which each observes the choices made by those who precede him. The decision to protest reveals a preference to have a successful revolution over the status quo also this causes people later in the sequence to conclude the fact that beliefs of the protestors have exceeded that critical probability. Given that each person knows that everyone else has received the signals concerning the state of nature, the political protests allows poor people to make conclusions about the signals that were received and to update their own beliefs accordingly. If this information process reaches a threshold where the updated beliefs of a poor agent exceed the critical probability, then an information cascade is triggered. The opinions and beliefs of all the poor people become updated in a way that makes them all decide to protest, and if all the people protest, then it can be assumed that the rebellion is successful and a revolution has taken place. Two conditions termed the ‘Political Protest Condition’ and the ‘Cascade Condition’ can be of aid to represent the information cascade/information dissemination process. The political protest condition represents the relationship between the beliefs that are necessary to convince a person to rebel while the cascade condition is the number of poor people that need to rebel to ensure a successful rebellion given the conditions required to bring about an act of rebellion by an individual person.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02401.x/pdf