The Impact of the Information Revolution on Protest Frequency in Repressive Contexts

Does the information revolution empower the coercive control of repressive regimes at the expense of civil resistance movements, or vice versa? One way to answer this question is to test whether the diffusion of information communication technology—measured by increasing numbers of Internet and mobile phone users—is a statistically significant predictor of anti-government protests after controlling for other causes of protests. If a positive and statistically significant relationship exists between protest frequency and access to ICT, then one might conclude that the information revolution empowers civil resistance movements at the expense of coercive regimes. If a negative relationship exists, one might deduce that repressive governments have the upper hand. Correlation analysis and negative binomial regression analysis was carried out on 22 countries between 1990-2007. These countries were selected because their regimes have the technical capacity to repress information. Five regression models were run. The first model included all 22 countries. Th