The role of Information Cascades in the Arab Spring
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/13/what-really-made-the-arab-uprisings-contagious/
Information cascades can lead to an array of different outcomes ranging from people all choosing the same messaging app to complete political regime changes. In an article in the Washington Post, cited above, Merouan Mekouar provides evidence and reasoning for why certain information cascades spread across and in between countries and how some led to extreme political change. Essentially, countries are split in to two categories, ones that enacted political regime changes and ones that did not. The difference between countries that revolted and ones that did not could have had a lot to do with information cascades that happened within the country. Because of the nature of some of these authoritarian political regimes, information is tightly restricted, like various restrictions on information that were used in examples from class, and therefore certain people or groups decisions on whether to support current regimes or rebels could easily cause an information cascade resulting in the majority of a country deciding whether or not to revolt. Individual citizens know their own level of discomfort with the current regime and maybe know something about their friends and families opinions as well but individuals in these countries because of the government restricted information systems may not know a lot about the attitudes of the rest of the citizens in the country. As the article discusses, countries that revolted had a few key differences that led to information cascades. Countries that revolted often had political groups or figures close to the current regime decide to revolt. This key distinction is rooted in the idea that those people then gave individuals who were already unhappy with the current regime the information necessary to decide to actually choose to revolt, and because these groups were unexpected defectors it was easy for the information to spread to the entire country as the government was not prepared to stop that flow of information. This theory is interesting because it focuses in one a key distinction between countries that did and did not revolt even if it may oversimplify or exaggerate the importance of the information cascade while not fully acknowledging other factors that could have led certain countries to revolt and others to not revolt.
This article directly relates to the class material on information cascades and specifically many of the example problems we looked at when discussing information cascades. The role of the important defector political groups and individuals mentioned in the article are a combination of certain players having more and better information than others and therefore influencing others behaviors. The example of the important political figure can be thought of in the same light as a player in one of the problems from problem set 6 in which one players has access to three more signals than another and therefore will strongly influence the behavior of the player that does not have access to as many signals. The important political figure can also be seen as having better information and therefore causing an information cascade throughout the country because of their relative political importance and their own connections leading to their own signal and decision. This interesting take on what led to information cascades resulting in countries to revolt during the Arab Spring shows the importance of information in the decision making of groups of people because, as shown in this example, widespread individual beliefs or information on a topic does not necessarily lead to widespread behavior, it often is the case that people or groups with what is perceived to be more or better information/signals could end up having a large role in creating an information cascade and influencing the lives and decisions of many other individuals.