Состоялось очередное заседание научного семинара "Политическая экономика"

Докладчик:  Natalia Lamberova  (UCLA)
Тема:  "Leaderless Protests"

Соавтор: Dmitry Dagaev (HSE), Anton Sobolev (UCLA), Konstantin Sonin (HSE)

Аннотация:

We seek to explain the “leaderless” nature of protests, taking into account costs of becoming a protest leader. We explain the absence of the positive agenda through the relative ease of political activism. We build a model, using citizen-candidate approach, allowing protesters to decide whether to support the nearest activist, or to become an activist himself or herself and pay the cost of doing so. As technology develops, it allows activist to mobilize their support base more efficiently, effectively reducing the costs of entry. Thus, the multitude of activists on the street precludes the aggregation of unified agenda. This perspective sheds the light on the “leaderless” structure of protests that different countries witnessed in recent years.

We test the predictions of our model, using the data on the structure and disunity of the protest  from The Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) Data Project as our main dependent variables. The  Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive is a source of explanatory variables (newspapers, radio, TV and Internet penetration). We control for a set of economic and socio-demographic  parameters such as media freedom (Freedom House) and ethnic, linguistic, religious fractionalization (Alesina et al, 2003) to avoid possible biases.

We find that the proliferation of media does indeed lead to less hierarchical protests and diversity of agendas, suggesting that “leaderless protest” is in fact the protest, led by too many leaders . How does political polarization affect the welfare of the electorate? We analyze this question using a framework in which two policy and office motivated parties compete in an infinite sequence of elections. We propose two novel measures to describe the degree of conflict among agents:  antagonism  is the disagreement between parties;  extremism  is the disagreement between each party and the representative voter. We show that forward-looking parties have an incentive to implement policies favored by the representative voter, in an attempt to constraint future challengers. This incentive grows as antagonism increases. On the other hand, extremism decreases the electorate's welfare.

  Научный семинар "Политическая экономика" состоялся 16 декабря (вторник) 2014г. в 18:15 в аудитории 4322.