Is Network Structure Important for Protest Mobilization? Findings from Agent-Based Modeling

Monitoring Obshchestvennogo Mneniya: Ekonomichekie i Sotsial'nye Peremeny. 2021. No. 6. P. 226–253.

Petrov A. P., Akhremenko A.S., Zheglov S.A., Kruchinskaia E.V.

In  recent  decades,  the  fo-cus of civic engagement research has shifted towards studying social environments’ effects on individuals’ decisions on whether to participate in a given activity or not. Online communication has been increasingly influencing the scale of  social  environments  as  well  as  the  features of both online and offline inter-personal communications. Surely, then, individuals’ decisions concerning protest mobilization  are  bound  to  be  affected  by  network  properties.  Using  a  series  of  ABM  models  with  different  network structures, we try to identify the structural factors of networks that can influence individuals who are deciding whether to join a protest. The established research in  this  field  traditionally  points  to  two  structural factors: network topology and homophily. To our knowledge, however, the  literature  has  not  considered  two  above-mentioned  structural  factors  in  combination. In other words, their joint influence  on  protest  mobilization  has  not been tested. To fill this research gap, we combine several network topologies with  enabled/disabled  homophily  and  examine how the combination influences protest turnout and survival. Numerical experiments  show  that  homophily  is  positively  associated  with  the  survival  of  the  protest,  but  negatively  with  its  size for any network topology. Since we infer this conclusion from a theory-based computational model, we also propose how empirical testing can be conducted.

Keywords: социальные сети, социальные медиа, political mobilization, Homophily, политический протест, политическая мобилизация, network topology, social media, агентно-ориентированная модель, гомофилия, political protest, agent-oriented model, топология сети