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The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989–91
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
This article analyzes the dynamics of turnout and the political impact of five cycles of protest, consisting of forty-two mass demonstrations that occurred on Mondays in Leipzig over the period 1989–91. These demonstrations are interpreted as an informational cascade that publicly revealed some of the previously hidden information about the malign nature of the East German communist regime. Once this information became publicly available, the viability of the regime was undermined. The Monday demonstrations subsequently died a slow death as their informational role declined.
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References
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23 A more complex model would allow individuals to make inferences about the repressiveness of the regime based on their interaction with police and state security forces during demonstrations.
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34 Wielepp (fn. 33), 72; Links, and Bahrmann, (fn. 33), 140.Google Scholar
35 The largest single demonstration took place in East Berlin on November 4; however, in the fall of 1989, turnout in Leipzig was highest, both in the aggregate over time and in terms of percentage of local population mobilized.
36 Opp and his coauthors suggest that the Leipzig setting is a perfect example of a focal point in a coordination problem; see Opp, Karl Dieter, “DDR ′89: Zu den Ursachen einer Spontanen Revolution,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 43, no. 2 (1991)Google Scholar; idem, “Spontaneous Revolutions: The Case of East Germany in 1989,” in Kurz, Heinz D., ed., United Germany and the New Europe (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1993)Google Scholar; Opp, Karl Dieter and Gern, Christiane, “Dissident Groups, Personal Networks, and Spontaneous Cooperation: The East-German Revolution of 1989,” American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Opp, Karl Dieter, Voβ, Peter, and Gern, Christiane, Die volkseigene Revolution (The revolution owned by the people) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993).Google Scholar
37 Tetzner, (fn. 33), 16.Google Scholar
38 Links, and Bahrmann, (fn. 33), 30.Google Scholar
39 Ibid., 88.
40 Wielepp, (fn. 33), 76.Google Scholar
41 Schneider, (fn. 2), 8.Google Scholar
42 See Lohmann (fn. 26).
43 Leipziger Volkszeitung, September 26,1989, p. 10.
44 Ibid., October 17,1989, p. 1.
45 This conclusion is supported by public opinion polls conducted in September and October 1990, according to which 42% of East Germans lacked the confidence to make a fresh start by moving to West Germany; see Der Spiegel (fn. 33), 15. Similarly, a sample of GDR citizens who emigrated between August and November 1989 was questioned in December 1989 and January 1990, revealing some of the risks involved in moving to the West; 35% of the emigrants seeking a job had failed to find employment at the time of the poll; in 22% of the cases the emigrants' jobs were unrelated to their GDR qualifications; and 19% of the sample was considering returning to the GDR sometime in the future; see Köhler, Anne, “1st die Übersiedlerwelle noch zu stoppen?” Deutschland-Archiv 23 (March 1990), 428–29.Google Scholar
46 An informational cascade argument suggests that these poll results could have provided an additional source of information for the general public and thereby affected the path of the East German revolution. However, I believe that such informational effects are negligible: the mass public was by and large unaware of these poll results.
47 The percentage numbers add up to more than 100% because the respondents were allowed to express support for more than one party.
48 German Information Center, ed., “Monday Demonstrations to Continue ‘Under New Management’,” Week in Germany, April 12, 1991, p. 2.Google Scholar
49 Ibid.
50 The claim that the expected cost of participation attained a maximum in this demonstration is based on the subjective assessments of participants revealed in diaries and documentation covering the Leipzig demonstrations.
51 The complementary role played by exit and voice in the East German revolution is also noted by Pollack, Detlef, “Das Ende einer Organisationsgesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19 (August 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
52 DeNardo (fn. 6).
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54 See also section B of the mathematical appendix.
55 Interestingly, a negative relationship between organization and the strength of protest also shows up in the Italian and West German protest data analyzed by Tarrow, Sidney, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Koopmans, Ruud, “The Dynamics of Protest Waves: West Germany, 1965–1989,” American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In their data the peak in the total number of protests coincides with the peak in the number of unorganized protests.
56 Corey, Scott, “Crisis in the Study of Revolution” (Paper presented at the meetings of the American Political Science Association, September 1992), 8.Google Scholar
57 For simplicity, I assume that the individuals do not discount the future. The results of the analysis would not be affected qualitatively if this assumption were relaxed to allow for some discounting.
58 The loss function could be modified to include a term that reflects the losses generated by the incumbency of the status quo regime in periods 1,…, T. However, the addition of this term would not change the individuals' political action decisions, since their actions or abstentions cannot affect these losses.
59 Lohmann (fn. 21) develops a variant of the model in which proponents of the status quo may choose to take counteracting political action, albeit in a static setting.
This specification of the individuals' political action strategies restricts them to using pure strategies. The pure strategy cutpoint equilibrium characterized here does not exist for a subset of the parameter space. In this case, a mixed strategy equilibrium may arise. Lohmann (fn. 21) sketches the mixed strategy solution, albeit for a static setting.
60 A more complex model would explicitly analyze the individuals' regime support strategies; compare Lohmann (fn. 16, 1994).
61 Kreps, David H. and Wilson, Robert, “Sequential Equilibria,” Econometrica 50 (July 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lohmann (fn. 16, 1994) discusses the equilibrium concept in more detail.
62 The intuition underlying the results can be conveyed by the analysis of this special case. The more general case of 0 <T<∞ is analyzed in Lohmann (fn. 7), albeit in an otherwise simpler setting.
63 I restrict attention to the case in which The alternative case in which is easily derived along the lines developed here.
64 As before, I restrict attention to the case in which The alternative case in which is easily derived along the lines developed here.
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