IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jas/jasssj/2013-59-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

ICTs, Social Connectivity, and Collective Action: A Cultural-Political Perspective

Author

Abstract

In recent years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have significantly affected the outcomes of large-scale collective actions. In addition, there is a well-known theoretical proposition that ICTs can fuel collective action by increasing individuals’ social connectivity that is closely related to recruitment capacity. This study aims to test this proposition by examining two moderating factors: the cultural context (i.e., online communication patterns) and the political context (i.e., the distribution of political preferences). By utilizing agent-based modeling, we find that ICT-improved connectivity not only scales down collective action if the distribution of political preference is insufficiently dispersed, but it also slows the diffusion speed if the overall propensity to participate is not strong. Moreover, the effects of ICT-improved connectivity on the scale and speed of collective action are similar under different cultural contexts. However, the theoretical implications suggest that ICTs are more effective in the collectivistic culture than in the individualistic culture.

Suggested Citation

  • Hai-hua Hu & Wen-tian Cui & Jun Lin & Yan-jun Qian, 2014. "ICTs, Social Connectivity, and Collective Action: A Cultural-Political Perspective," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, vol. 17(2), pages 1-7.
    • Handle: RePEc:jas:jasssj:2013-59-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.jasss.org/17/2/7/7.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lu, Peng, 2016. "Predicting peak of participants in collective action," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 274(C), pages 318-330.
    2. Lu, Peng, 2015. "Imitating winner or sympathizing loser? Quadratic effects on cooperative behavior in prisoners’ dilemma games," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 436(C), pages 327-337.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jas:jasssj:2013-59-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Francesco Renzini (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.