Communication Networks and Protests: Investigating the 'Occupy Movement' in the United States

This paper investigates the influence of broadband Internet availability in the occurrence of events of civil unrest, both with theory and empirical evidence. We first propose minor changes to a recent model of protests considering the hypothesis that the Internet sets an environment for communication and information exchange that boosts collective dissatisfaction towards unfair policies. We then use collected data on the locations of 2011's Occupy Movement in the United States, together with an instrumental variable approach, to estimate the positive, statistically significant impact of one extra Internet Service Provider on the probability of evidencing protests in a given location.