![]() Although these protests were driven by distinct political agendas under different social and economic circumstances, these demonstrations share the same morphological feature: the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile phones, the Internet, and Internet-based social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter), to help protesters self-organize and recruit participants.ġ.2 Numerous scholars and policy makers believe that ICTs can be an important catalyst for large-scale collective actions in term of such technologies' advantage on social connectivity ( Farrell 2012 Van Laer 2010). ICTs, Social Connectivity, Collective Action, Cultural Difference, Political Preference Distribution, Agent-Based Modelingġ.1 Large-scale protests, such as those in response to election fraud in Moldova and Iran in 2009, the uprisings and revolutions in the Arab world since 2011, Occupy Wall Street in the United States in 2011, and Los Indignados in Spain in 2012, have produced serious consequences on relevant sociopolitical systems. However, the theoretical implications suggest that ICTs are more effective in the collectivistic culture than in the individualistic culture. Moreover, the effects of ICT-improved connectivity on the scale and speed of collective action are similar under different cultural contexts. By utilizing agent-based modeling, we find that ICT-improved connectivity not only scales down collective action if the distribution of political preference is insufficiently dispersed, but it also slows the diffusion speed if the overall propensity to participate is not strong. This study aims to test this proposition by examining two moderating factors: the cultural context (i.e., online communication patterns) and the political context (i.e., the distribution of political preferences). In addition, there is a well-known theoretical proposition that ICTs can fuel collective action by increasing individuals’ social connectivity that is closely related to recruitment capacity. In recent years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have significantly affected the outcomes of large-scale collective actions. ![]()
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