The Leipzig Monday Demonstrations and Information Cascades
In this post I will give an overview of how information cascades can be applied to explain how large scale protest movements develop. To show this, I’ll describe how such a model can be used to explain the Leipzig Monday demonstrations, a series of demonstrations that occurred near the fall of East Germany.
In late 1989, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) was in disarray. In the previous decade, the economy of the GDR had been slowly collapsing as the country’s natural resources were diminished, and the GDR’s ruling regime unraveled. As a result, most GDR citizens were unhappy with the ruling regime, and had no limited outlets to express this dissatisfaction. The GDR had a history of violently suppressing uprisings, and expressed willingness to continue to do so. This made the cost of protesting potentially very high, if the government were to follow through with their threats of violence. Despite this cost, starting in September of 1989, people in the city of Leipzig staged increasingly large weekly “Monday ” demonstrations in response to the government’s actions. In her 1994 article, Lohmann shows that the growth of these protests can be modeled as an information cascade.
Lohmann describes the goal of a demonstration as the aggregation of enough information about why the regime is bad in order to drum up enough public support for a regime change. Each individual has some private information about the regime, be it positive or negative, and makes a decision to either protest or not based on the political cost of protesting vs what they gain from influencing a regime change. Negative information about the regime is aggregated as more individuals join the protest, and if enough information becomes available, the regime will collapse. From this perspective, we can view the process of people joining a protest as an information cascade. Early individuals choose to protest based on their own private information. This affects the decision of other individuals by (1) showing that other people have negative information about the regime, making it more likely that their participation will cause a regime change, and (2) indicates to people the potential cost of participating in the protest movement. As most people in the GDR were dissatisfied with the regime, just in varying degrees, even a small protest can make it rational for less dissatisfied individuals to participate in future protests, as it demonstrates the likelihood that their participation will result in regime change (a positive), and shows that the cost of participation may be lower than they thought (less negative).
Viewing this in terms of the language we used in class, the payoff of choosing to protest is the payoff of not having to live under a regime the individual sees as oppressive minus the potential cost of participating due to repression. However, if an individual chooses not to protest, then they avoid the potential political cost while having the negative of still living under a repressive regime, if their actions might have changed the outcome of the protest.
Now we can show how the Leipzig monday demonstrations illustrate this model of protests. We will look at the first round of protests against the GDR in late 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin wall. Leipzig’s distance from Berlin meant the Stasi were less present in the area, leading to a lower political cost for those wanting to protest. Despite this, the political cost of protesting was still relatively high, leading to the first few rounds of protest being dominated by anti-GDR radicals with large grievances.
As the weeks passed, the local government took little interest in the protests, so they went on uninterrupted. This illustrates point (2) of the information cascade model, as this demonstrated to the public that the cost of participation may have been lower than they thought. In addition, although most Germans had grievances with the GDR government, and most citizens had figured out that everyone else thought a similar way, the political climate was such that most were unwilling to put this information together to show why a regime change was necessary. However, as people started to demonstrate, point (1) demonstrates how people may become more willing to contribute their sentiments in order to increase the likelihood of regime change.
We can see this happening with the rapid increase in size of the Leipzig protests. Starting at a few hundred people demonstrating, this information cascade led to a peak of 325000 people protesting around the center of the city. Early in the protest, we saw how there was little backlash given to the protestors. This lowered the political cost of protesting, making it more likely for more moderate individuals to join. In addition, people were able to see the aggregate of negative sentiment about the regime as a result of the protest. This makes it more likely that contributing your own negative sentiment will result in a successful protest, increasing the benefit for joining the protest. Therefore, the previous information makes it rational to join the protest, even if on your own it would have been better for you to not join.
Overall, the Leipzig demonstrations give an interesting example of information cascades, and how previous actions of individuals can influence the decisions of others in a decision to protest.
Lohmann, S. (1994). The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91. World Politics, 47(1), 42–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/2950679
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2950679
Shirky, Clay. (2009). Here comes everybody : the power of organizing without organizations. New York :Penguin Books,