Riots, Revolutions, democratisation, and Information cascade
The mechanism behind how riots become organized and ultimately transform into successful revolutions has been an object of interest for decades. According to the research executed by Ellis and Fender, information cascades, aided by the latest technology, have facilitated successful revolutions that took place in the contemporary society, such as the Arab Spring and the summer riots in London. Major world events, such as the Arab Spring of 2011, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union all have one thing in common; information cascade played a major role in popularizing the movement. Information cascade occurs when people make decisions based upon their observations of other people’s actions. In those events, people decided whether to rebel or not through observation of other people’s behaviors along with any kind of signals that might contain a certain information about the state of the regime. If a certain group of anti-government organizes a rebel, others who might be closely related to the original members or who are susceptible to instigations follow the movement, thinking that their rebellion might be a reflection of the regime’s weakness. Once a significant number of people join the rebellion, there arises a successful revolution and the rules are overthrown. During the progression of information cascades, technologies such as Twitter and Facebook, contributed to making such cascades much more powerful. The reason being that information transmission allows rioters to organize their activities and facilitates the diffusion of the rioting to other regions. Simply put, information cascade that occurred within personal level later on develops as a cascade in regional level and ultimately in national level.
www.voxeu.org/article/riots-and-revolutions-digital-age