Coordinated Adoption of Social Innovations

The members of a society are faced with the decision whether or not to participate in an anti-government protest. Their utilities depend on their own decision but also on those of their neighbors in an underlying social network. They randomly observe other people's decisions, gather information on who is already active, and base their decision on their information. The model uses a Markov process (that depends on the underlying social network) to analyze who will become active over time. Two new features are essential: first, only very mild assumptions about the underlying social network are made, in particular agents can be entirely heterogeneous. Second, individuals are allowed to coordinate their decision if they mutually observe each other. The government can use political violence in order to change people's utility from being active. The probability of a revolution can thereby be reduced in the short run, but not in the long run. Under political repression protests do not increase gradually, but suddenly; and the conditional probability of a quick revolution given a protest increases if the regime turns violently against the protesters. Since large jumps in the number of activists depend on their capability to coordinate, the repression of political activism is more effective in countries where social media are not easily accessible. The findings are illustrated by data on the number of protests and revolutions world-wide depending on a country's number on the Political Terror Scale.