Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Authors' names are listed in reverse alphabetical order; equal authorship is implied. This project was in part funded by the Program for the Study of Democracy, Institutions and Political Economy (DIPE) at Duke University. We thank Andreas Forø Tollefsen and colleagues for sharing the PRIO-GRID dataset with us. The availability of these data made life much easier on us. We are very grateful for comments and criticisms from four anonymous reviewers, the editors of the APSR, Cassy Dorff, Vincent Gawronski, Evan Lieberman, Nils W. Metternich, Brittany N. Perry, Audrey Sacks, Michael D. Ward, Erik Wibbels, and William Wittels. Their comments and suggestions helped to substantially improve our research and this paper. A previous version of this paper was presented at MPSA 2012 in Chicago. All remaining errors are our own. Data and replication files are available on the authors' dataverse subject to dissemination restrictions by the GSMA.
'The mobile industry changed Africa. I must admit we were not smart enough to foresee that. What we saw was a real need for telecommunication in Africa, and that need had not been fulfilled. For me that was a business project." Mo Ibrahim, as quoted by Livingston (2011, 10).
This quote from Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-born cell phone magnate, exemplifies the increasing influence new media technologies have in Africa. During the recent events of the Arab Spring, cell phones and other new media technologies have worked as catalysts for political collective action (Aday et al. 2012; Breuer, Landman, and Farquhar 2012). While many commentators describe the effect of modern communication technologies on political action, social scientific research is only slowly catching up (but see, for example, Aday et al. 2012; Breuer, Landman, and Farquhar 2012; Shirky 2008). In this article we ask whether modern communication technology has affected political collective action in Africa. Specifically we ask if the rapid spread of cell phone technology has increased organized and violent forms of collective action.
We focus on the connection between communication technology and violent, organized forms of collective action for several reasons. While scholars in economics and other fields have been concerned with the beneficial effects of cell phones for various development outcomes (Abraham 2007; Aker 2010; Aker, Ksoll, and Lybbert...