Katrin Paula presents her research on the repression-protest nexus and the role of media reporting in 1989 East Germany. This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for International Security.
How does information about repression affect the spread of protest in an autocracy? Despite substantive research interest, the effect of repression on political uprisings is still unclear, with results ranging from mobilizing to deterring to curve-linear effects. Arguments are traditionally tested using data at a high level of aggregation, neglecting subnational variation, and most accounts leave open the question of how people gain knowledge about repression - a crucial precondition for any effect to occur. In this presentation, Katrin Paula, assistant professor at TU Munich, will argue that the effect of repression can be heterogeneous since protest behavior is a function of spatially varying costs and threat perceptions, depending on the distance to the threat. Moreover, if repression at one protest site is to have an impact on mobilization elsewhere, information about repression must be communicated through a channel that reaches a large part of society.
Combining novel geo-referenced data on protest and repression in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 with a content analysis of West German television broadcasts, Paula will show that media reports on repression fostered the nationwide spread of protests. At the same time, these reports deterred protests locally: Reports on repression at a particular protest location reduced the subsequent propensity to protest in surrounding communities. Conversely, acts of repression without media coverage had no effect on the diffusion of protests. The findings have implications for the study of the repression-protest nexus and for the impact of the media on the stability of autocratic regimes.
Speaker
Katrin Paula
Katrin Paula is an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. She works at the intersection of social movements, contentious politics, and information and communication technologies. In particular, her research examines how information technologies affect political mobilization and violence. She holds a PhD from the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, where she also worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Sociological Methodology and in the ERC-funded project “Repression and the Escalation of Violence” at the Chair of International Relations.
