Research Articles

Journal of Peace Research

2015, Vol. 52(3) 269–284
A spatial analysis of the impact of West ª The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
German television on protest mobilization sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0022343314554245
during the East German revolution jpr.sagepub.com

Charles Crabtree
Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University
David Darmofal
Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina
Holger L Kern
Department of Political Science, Florida State University

Abstract
Formal models of revolutionary collective action suggest that ‘informational cascades’ play a crucial role in overcom-
ing collective action problems. These models highlight how information about the aggregate level of participation in
collective action conveys information about others’ political preferences, and how such informational cues allow
potential participants to update their beliefs about the value of participating in antiregime collective action. In
authoritarian regimes, foreign mass media are often the only credible source of information about antiregime pro-
tests. However, limited robust evidence exists on whether foreign media can indeed serve as a coordination device
for collective action. This article makes use of a detailed dataset on protest events during the 1989 East German rev-
olution and exploits the fact that West German television broadcasts could be received in most but not all parts of
East Germany. Across a wide range of Cox proportional hazards models and conditional on a rich set of observables,
it finds that the availability of West German television did not affect the probability of protest events occurring. The
evidence presented here does not support the widely accepted ‘fact’ that West German television served as a coordi-
nation device for antiregime protests during the East German revolution. More broadly, it also calls into question
strong claims about the effects of communication technology on revolutionary collective action.

Keywords
authoritarian regimes, collective action, democratization, East Germany, mass media, natural experiment

Introduction to democracy, in particular during the third wave of

democratization (Huntington, 1991: 100–106; Schmit-
Overthrowing an authoritarian regime is incredibly diffi-
ter, 1996: 34–35; Whitehead, 1996: 5–8). However, the
cult. It requires ordinary citizens to overcome collective
state of empirical research in this area can still be
action problems and to coordinate their antiregime beha-
described as inchoate. Only a handful of studies have
vior (Lichbach, 1995). Such coordination is complicated
empirically examined the question of whether foreign
both by the prevalence of preference falsification (Kuran,
mass media can indeed facilitate revolutionary collective
1989, 1991), which makes it difficult to accurately gauge
action. Our article contributes to this literature, and the
the strength of antiregime sentiments among the citi-
zenry, and the absence of independent domestic media
in authoritarian regimes. The theoretical literature thus Corresponding author:
stresses the importance of foreign media in transitions hkern@fsu.edu
270
literature on media effects in authoritarian regimes more
generally, by examining the role played by West German
television (WGTV) during the East German revolution.1
Because of its historical significance and the unparalleled
wealth of primary sources that has become available after
German reunification, the East German revolution is a
prominent case in the literature on social movements
and revolutionary collective action (e.g. Hirschman,
1993; Lohmann, 1994; Pfaff & Kim, 2003; Pfaff,
2006). According to this literature, WGTV played a key
role during the East German revolution by broadcasting
news about the escalating political crisis directly into East
German living rooms. The literature suggests that by
spreading knowledge of successful protests and the unex-
pected vulnerability of the East German dictatorship,
WGTV was able to alter East Germans’ perceptions of
political opportunity and to facilitate the activation and
diffusion of protest (Kuran, 1991: 37; Opp, Voss &
Gern, 1993: 254–255; Opp & Gern, 1993: 675–676;
Hirschman, 1993: 198; Jarausch, 1994: 44; Grix,
2000: 32–33).
In this article, we evaluate this widely held claim that
WGTV served as a coordination device for protest activ-
ities during the East German revolution. Our research
design is based on a natural experiment, as we make
use of the fact that WGTV broadcasts could be
received in most but not all parts of East Germany
(Kern & Hainmueller, 2009: 380–382). Relying on
a detailed micro-level dataset of more than 2,700 pro-
test events that took place between September 1989
and March 1990, we use Cox proportional hazards
models to model the risk of protest events at the
county-level conditional on the availability of WGTV
and an unusually rich set of covariates. In the next
section, we begin by providing some historical back-
ground on the East German revolution. We then
review the literature on mass media and revolutionary
collective action. Following that, we introduce our
research design and statistical model. We then present
and discuss our results. The last section concludes.
The 1989 East German revolution
Until its collapse in 1989, the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) was seen as one of the most stable
1
WGTV refers to ARD and ZDF, the two major West German
public broadcasting stations. Commercial television had been
introduced in West Germany in the mid-1980s, but it did not broad-
cast to East Germany and could only be received in some areas near
West Berlin.
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Western observ-
ers were impressed with East Germany’s economic per-
formance and regarded it as a socialist success story
(Kopstein, 1997: 1–13). The Socialist Unity Party of
Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands,
SED) ruled East Germany through an implicit social
contract that rewarded political acquiescence with stea-
dily improving living standards (Pollack, 2000: 35–40;
Dale, 2005: 59–81). As the 1980s progressed, however,
the East German regime became increasingly incapable
of buying off its people. During the 1970s, East German
economic growth had been spurred by easy access to
international credit and economic aid from the Soviet
Union. The 1970s oil shocks, rising interest rates, and
reduced Soviet subsidies revealed the structural weak-
nesses of East Germany’s centrally planned economy.
With its focus on heavy industry and the extensive use
of factor inputs, the East German economy was ill
equipped to participate in the technological revolution
that was propelling growth in capitalist economies (Sti-
glitz, 1994). By the late 1980s, stagnation had become
evident (Kopstein, 1997). Even though nominal wages
continued to rise, inflation, frequent consumer goods
shortages, and the lack of adequate housing left many
East Germans with the impression that their living stan-
dards were stagnating, if not declining (Schneider,
1996). The gap between West and East Germany had
never been as plainly visible as in the late 1980s, as the
availability of WGTV and visits to and from the West
facilitated direct comparisons of living standards (Dale,
2005: 82–97).
Economic discontent was not the only reason for the
communist regime’s lack of popular support. The appal-
ling state of the environment also undermined its legiti-
macy. The East German economy was geared towards
maximizing output regardless of the ecological conse-
quences. East Germany’s large chemical industry and the
use of brown coal for electrical power production, com-
pounded by the lack of effective pollution abatement
technology, led to dramatic ecological damages. East
Germany’s emission rates of pollutants such as particu-
late matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides were
among the highest in Europe. Indeed, per capita sulfur
dioxide and particulate matter emissions were more than
15 times as high as in West Germany (Kuhrt, Buck &
Holzweissig, 1996).
As in other communist countries, political dissent was
not tolerated in East Germany. Lacking the opportunity
to voice their concerns, many dissatisfied East Germans
left their country, either legally after they had received
exit visas (after a waiting period that could last up to ten
Crabtree et al.
years) or illegally. Dissidents who remained could only
find support within the confines of the Protestant
church. A number of clergymen supported small groups
of political activists concerned with issues of peace, sus-
tainable development, the environment, and human
rights by providing them with access to modest resources
such as telephones, copying machines, and meeting
space. Some activists dismissed from their state jobs also
found employment with the church. In the late 1980s, a
tiny East German samizdat press emerged that attempted
to create a public sphere independent of the regime
(Neubert, 1998; Pollack, 2000: 197–200; Dale, 2005:
103–107).
The majority of East Germans, however, found nei-
ther the political program nor the lifestyle of these polit-
ical activists attractive. Most East Germans valued higher
living standards and the freedom to travel to the West
more than the ‘socialism with a human face’ that dissi-
dents attempted to bring about (Pollack, 2000: 205–
208; Dale, 2005: 98–119). Opposition groups remained
on the fringes of popular political activity, neither orga-
nizing nor playing a key role in the protests that erupted
in September and October 1989 (Opp, Voss & Gern,
1993; Opp & Gern, 1993). The first ‘Monday demon-
strations’ in Leipzig were predominantly led by East Ger-
mans who had applied for exit visas and were hoping that
public protest would make them enough of a nuisance to
the regime to be allowed to leave the country (Pollack,
2000: 209–234).
In contrast to Hungary and Poland, no significant
impetus for reform arose from within the ruling party.
Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to the leader-
ship of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, relations
between the GDR and the Soviet Union swiftly soured,
with East Germany distancing itself from Gorbachev’s
reform program. Most East Germans in contrast wel-
comed Gorbachev’s reforms and hoped for similar
changes in East Germany (Süss, 1996).
The East German regime’s situation became increas-
ingly difficult when Hungary and Poland both effectively
left the Soviet bloc at the beginning of 1989. In January,
non-communist parties were legalized in Hungary. In
February, round-table talks began in Poland and in June,
the Polish Communist Party relinquished its hold on
power. In May, Hungary started to dismantle its border
fortifications with Austria. Throughout the summer,
thousands of East Germans vacationing in Hungary
made use of what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime oppor-
tunity to escape to the West. Others occupied West Ger-
man embassies in Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest to
force their emigration to West Germany. The East
271
German regime eventually relented and allowed all East
Germans occupying West German embassies to leave for
West Germany (Zelikow & Rice, 1995: 63–101).
The regime’s demand that the sealed trains carrying
them to West Germany had to cross East German terri-
tory so that they could be formally stripped off their citi-
zenship and expelled from East Germany backfired,
however. Many East Germans learned about this com-
promise solution from WGTV. Along the train route,
large-scale riots broke out between the police and desper-
ate East Germans who attempted to board the trains.
The East German leadership, focused on the celebration
of the 40th anniversary of the GDR on 7 October, had
seriously misread the public mood. While East German
media remained silent about the riots, WGTV broadcast
dramatic footage of the arrival of thousands of East Ger-
man emigrees in West Germany. This mass exodus and
the way it was mismanaged by the East German regime
significantly fueled public protests (Hirschman, 1993:
186–193; Pfaff & Kim, 2003: 415–416).
Mass media and revolutionary collective action
According to relative deprivation theory (Gurr, 1970),
people rebel when they perceive a discrepancy between
their material expectations and the regime’s ability to
ensure the living standards to which they feel entitled.
Such a gap undoubtedly existed for most East Germans,
who coveted Western consumer goods and wished for
the freedom to travel to the exotic places shown on
WGTV.2 Yet relative deprivation can hardly account for
the outbreak of the East German revolution (or any of
the East European revolutions). After all, living condi-
tions in West Germany had been significantly better
than in East Germany throughout the existence of the
two German states, yet mass protests did not break out
until summer 1989 (with the exception of the June
1953 uprising, which was quickly suppressed by Soviet
troops and tanks).3
The theory of political opportunity structure (Tarrow,
1998) is based on the notion that people do not rebel
when they are most discontent, but when a formerly
closed system of political opportunities for change opens
up. This was undoubtedly the case in East Germany.
2
WGTV was extremely popular in East Germany. Almost all East
Germans with access to WGTV watched it regularly not only
because of its political programming but also for entertainment
(Kern & Hainmueller, 2009).
3
Tilly, Tilly & Tilly (1975) is a classic criticism of relative
deprivation theory.
272
Gorbachev’s domestic reforms sowed discontent among
East Germans when the East German regime refused to
implement similar reforms in East Germany. More
importantly, the reforms also changed East Germans’
perceptions of the Soviet commitment to guarantee the
survival of the East German regime against domestic
challenges. The failed 1953 uprising had taught East
Germans that regime change would not be possible
against the wishes of the Soviet Union. Yet Gorbachev’s
reforms and his remark during a WGTV interview in
East Berlin on 6 October that ‘Those who are late will
be punished by life itself’ were interpreted by East Ger-
mans as at least tacit approval of political reform in East
Germany.4 Yet while political opportunity theory cor-
rectly highlights the (external) conditions that were nec-
essary for the overthrow of the East German regime, it
does not explain the process of micro-level mobilization
of antiregime protest.
The literature on bandwagon processes and behavioral
cascades explicitly addresses the micro-level problem of
protest participation by acknowledging that the decision
of one individual to join collective action depends upon
the decisions of others (Granovetter, 1978; Schelling,
1978). Kuran (1989, 1991) develops a model for partic-
ipation in revolutionary collective action. He posits that
every individual has two preferences over regime type: a
private preference and a public preference. The private
preference corresponds to one’s true preference, whereas
the public preference is the preference one chooses to
publicly reveal. Preference falsification denotes the situa-
tion in which private and public preferences diverge.
Whether an individual joins the opposition depends
on the trade-off between two payoffs, one external and
the other one internal. The external payoff captures the
incentives (e.g. future personal rewards if the opposition
is successful) and disincentives (e.g. risking one’s life) for
publicly declaring one’s support for the opposition
movement. The larger the existing opposition move-
ment, the smaller are the disincentives for participation,
since the likelihood of punishment for siding with the
opposition is decreasing in the size of the opposition.
If many people participate in antiregime protests, the
regime will be unable to punish most of them. If only
a few protest, in contrast, the regime will be able to
severely punish all of them. The internal payoff is rooted
in the psychological costs of preference falsification
4
In fact, Gorbachev’s exact words were less pithy. The sentence
quoted above seems to originate with Gorbachev’s press secretary,
Gennadi Gerassimow (Plog, 2004).
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
stemming from loss of personal autonomy and sacrifice
of personal integrity. The larger the divergence between
an individual’s public and private preferences, the larger
the psychological costs of ‘living a lie’ (Havel, 1985: 20).
Now assume that someone is opposed to the regime.
Holding his public and private preferences constant, as
the opposition movement grows, there comes a point
at which the psychological costs of publicly supporting
a secretly despised status quo outweigh the costs of join-
ing the opposition, and so the individual joins the oppo-
sition movement. This point is called his revolutionary
threshold: the opposition size required to change his
behavior from feigned support for the status quo to open
support for the opposition. A ‘revolutionary bandwagon’
ensues when someone joins the opposition, and that
leads others to join the opposition as well. Because of
such revolutionary bandwagons, authoritarian regimes
that once appeared unshakeable can see their support
crumble in no time. Whether such a cascade occurs
depends on the unobservable distribution of revolution-
ary thresholds, which is why revolutions are easy to
explain ex post but impossible to predict ex ante (Kuran,
1989, 1991).
Lohmann (1993, 1994) offers a slightly different
model in which turnout at protest events among political
moderates provides information about others’ political
preferences. Both Kuran (1991) and Lohmann (1994)
use their respective models to shed light on protest mobi-
lization during the East German revolution, stressing
how protest participation depended on credible informa-
tion about others’ political preferences. Neither their for-
mal models nor empirical analyses, however, contain
detailed discussions of the channels through which infor-
mation about the size of the opposition movement
(Kuran, 1989, 1991) or aggregate turnout of moderates
in protest events (Lohmann, 1993, 1994) is transmitted.
The widely cited article by Lohmann (1994), for exam-
ple, succeeds admirably in describing how the Monday
demonstrations in Leipzig helped to change public per-
ceptions of the vulnerability of the East German regime.
It also notes that mass demonstrations in Leipzig ‘trig-
gered a wave of political protest throughout the GDR’
(Lohmann, 1994: 42). Her account, however, does not
explain how East Germans learned about protest events
that the vast majority of them could not directly observe.
This omission is particularly critical in the context of
regimes with heavily censored, state-owned mass media
such as East Germany.
A number of authors have stressed WGTV’s role dur-
ing the East German revolution. Kuran (1991: 37) for
example writes with respect to the demonstrations that
Crabtree et al.
took place in East Berlin during the celebrations of the
40th anniversary of the GDR that WGTV ‘immediately
played these events back to the rest of East Germany.
The scenes alerted disgruntled citizens in every corner
of the country to the pervasiveness of discontent, while
the government’s weak response revealed its vulnerabil-
ity.’ Opp & Gern (1993: 675–676) note that ‘the [Leip-
zig] Monday prayers, together with the demonstrations,
contributed to the emergence of protest in other East
German cities. People were informed, primarily on
WGTV, about the events in Leipzig, and the expectation
formed that citizens in each city would meet sponta-
neously on the city square for Monday demonstrations.’
Jarausch (1994: 44) similarly notes that ‘Western televi-
sion coverage enabled acts of symbolic defiance to reach a
wider audience, spreading unrest.’ With regard to the
exiting crisis, Hirschman (1993: 198) writes that ‘pic-
tures of the exodus soon flooded the TV screens, with
the result of not just causing established critics [ . . . ]
to sharpen their criticism but also of making activists out
of long-passive average citizens’. Opp, Voss & Gern
(1993: 254–255, 260) and Grix (2000: 32–33) similarly
stress WGTV’s role in disseminating political informa-
tion not available from the state-controlled East German
media.
In the social movements literature, empirical research
on mass media as a facilitator of collective action has
largely been limited to the impact of domestic mass
media in democratic societies (e.g. Andrews & Biggs,
2006; Roscigno & Danaher, 2001; Myers, 2000). Work
on the impact of domestic mass media in authoritarian
settings in contrast is in its infancy. Yanagizawa-Drott
(2014) finds that radio broadcasts served as a coordina-
tion device for collective violence during the Rwandan
genocide. Enikolopov, Petrova & Zhuravskaya (2011),
in an article on media effects in Russia, demonstrate the
strong impact of the only national television channel
independent of the government on voting for opposition
parties during the 1999 parliamentary elections. Adena
et al. (2013) document the role that radio propaganda
played in undermining the democratic institutions of the
Weimar Republic and the rise of nazism in pre-WWII
Germany.
Recent research has also examined the role of hor-
izontal, ‘social’ communication technologies such as
cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter as opposed to
older vertical communication technologies (i.e. news-
papers, radio, and television) (Warren, 2014, 2015).
Shapiro & Weidmann (2015), for example, show that
the availability of cell phone networks reduced collec-
tive violence in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 by
273
lowering the transaction costs of cooperating with the
government. Pierskalla & Hollenbach (2013) in con-
trast present cross-national evidence for 27 African
countries that suggests that the availability of cell
phone technology facilitates violent collective action.
The recent literature on the Arab Spring and the
Color Revolutions likewise discusses the impact of social
communication technologies, although studies often fall
short of offering credible causal identification strategies.
Some scholars claim that social media either cause
(Shirky, 2011) or play a role in causing revolutions and
transitions to democracy (Howard, 2010; Hussain &
Howard, 2013). Others avoid explicit causal claims but
argue that social media are powerful tools that the oppo-
sition can use to disseminate information, circumvent
censorship, and organize and coordinate collective action
(Chebib & Sohail, 2011; Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011;
Khamis & Vaughn, 2011; Goldstein, 2007; Lynch,
2011, 2012: 10–11).
Most directly related to our research are articles by
Kern (2011) and Grdĕsić (2014) that both look at
WGTV’s role as a coordination device for protest activ-
ities during the East German revolution. Kern (2011)
compares counties without WGTV to a matched
comparison group of counties with WGTV, but does
not find any evidence that WGTV affected the speed
or depth of protest diffusion. Grdĕsić (2014) argues,
based on vector autoregressions and Granger causality
tests, that WGTV news reports about East German
protests ‘Granger caused’ protests in East Germany
the following day.
Research design
Our research design takes advantage of the fact that
WGTV broadcasts could be received in most but not
all parts of East Germany. Specifically the northeastern
part of East Germany and the Dresden district in the
southeast were by and large cut off from WGTV broad-
casts due to East Germany’s topography and their dis-
tance from West German broadcast transmission
towers. Historical maps of WGTV’s over-the-air signal
strength used in previous research (Kern & Hainmuel-
ler, 2009: Figures 1 and 3) allow us to distinguish
between broad areas of East Germany with and without
WGTV. However, these maps have a serious drawback
in that they are not detailed enough to allow us to reli-
ably determine the availability of WGTV at the county
level. We therefore use the Longley-Rice electromag-
netic signal propagation model in conjunction with ter-
rain data and data on the location and technical
274
Figure 1. Signal strength of WGTV in East Germany as predicted by Longley-Rice model
characteristics of WGTV broadcast transmitters to
model WGTV’s signal strength across East Germany
(see Figure 1).5 We then discretize this continuous
measure of WGTV signal strength to distinguish
between East German counties with and without
WGTV. We set the threshold value as the modeled
5
The same approach has been used in research on media effects in
economics to model the availability of radio and television signals
(Olken, 2009; Enikopolov, Petrova & Zhuravskaya, 2011;
DellaVigna et al., 2014). See the online appendix for a detailed
discussion.
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
average signal strength in the center of the city of Dres-
den. For a county to have access to WGTV, we require
that at least 50% of the county receives a signal equal to
or above that threshold (see Figure 2). While the map in
Figure 2 closely reproduces the overall pattern of the
historical maps shown in Kern & Hainmueller
(2009), our approach classifies a number of counties
differently than Kern (2011). In the online appen-
dix, we show that our results are unaffected when
we use Kern’s (2011) classification instead. More-
over, there we also show that our results are entirely
unaffected by the exact signal strength threshold
Crabtree et al.
Figure 2. East German counties with and without WGTV based on Longley-Rice model and Dresden cutoff level
used to separate counties with WGTV from counties
without WGTV.
Our identifying assumption is that access to WGTV
was idiosyncratic conditional on covariates. In other
words, we assume that whether a county had WGTV
or not was uncorrelated with unobserved county charac-
teristics related to the risk of protest, conditional on
observed characteristics. Kern (2011) already noted that
counties with and without WGTV differed in terms of
a number of covariates, several of which are plausibly
related to the risk of protest.
275
Table I shows balance statistics, comparing coun-
ties with WGTV to counties without WGTV. The
first set of covariates captures broad socio-economic
differences between counties in terms of log(popula-
tion size), population density, sector shares, the
shares of skilled and unskilled labor, and the propor-
tion of the population that holds a college degree, is
female, and of working age. A district capital dummy
denotes the capitals of the 15 East German districts
(Bezirke), which constituted the urban centers of East
Germany and might therefore have been more prone
276
Figure 3. Number of protests per county, East Germany, 4 September 1989–18 March 1990
to see antiregime protests. Other covariates capture
relative deprivation in dimensions that were particu-
larly salient in East Germany (Kuhrt, Buck & Holz-
weissig, 1996): housing quality (housing space per
capita and the proportion of apartments with bath-
rooms, interior toilets, and modern heating), the
provision of public goods (residents per medical doc-
tor and residents per dentist), and air pollution
(nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate mat-
ter emissions). We also measure the percentage pop-
ulation change over the preceding decade, which we
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
regard as a rough proxy for the overall desirability
of living in a county.6
While the most important aspect of political opportu-
nity structure, the change in Soviet policy with regards to
its Eastern European satellites, was constant across East
6
While residential mobility was very low in East Germany, we still
see meaningful over-time changes in population size across counties,
with 64 counties experiencing a change of more than +5% and 11
counties experiencing a change of more than +10% over the 1980–
88 period.
Crabtree et al. 277

Table I. Balance
Covariate WGTV Non-WGTV Standardized Variance t-test KS-test
mean mean difference ratio p-value p-value
Log(population size) 11.008 10.989 0.030 0.704 0.896 0.670
Population density 350.236 474.475 –0.149 1.128 0.478 0.517
% industry 0.357 0.314 0.302 1.146 0.154 0.127
% agriculture 0.174 0.191 –0.112 0.557 0.636 0.652
% crafts and construction 0.094 0.097 –0.118 1.044 0.578 0.567
% services and transportation 0.357 0.379 –0.274 0.770 0.228 0.278
% skilled 0.625 0.613 0.412 0.824 0.071 0.307
% unskilled 0.130 0.135 –0.248 1.346 0.224 0.273
% college 0.201 0.206 –0.167 0.717 0.465 0.599
% female 0.519 0.515 0.523 0.636 0.031 0.003
% working age 0.642 0.641 0.054 0.510 0.812 0.069
Housing space (m2) 27.342 26.152 0.568 0.415 0.028 0.000
% bathroom 0.819 0.795 0.323 0.574 0.178 0.029
% interior toilet 0.739 0.730 0.057 0.831 0.799 0.824
% modern heating 0.427 0.422 0.031 0.487 0.898 0.075
Residents per medical doctor 596.342 616.240 –0.100 1.053 0.637 0.082
Residents per dentist 1,549.489 1,573.600 –0.076 0.459 0.754 0.540
Nitrogen oxides (tons/km2) 6.235 7.630 –0.089 0.925 0.683 0.569
Sulfur dioxide (tons/km2) 81.554 86.248 –0.024 1.327 0.905 0.327
Respirable dust (tons/km2) 33.095 34.122 –0.016 2.227 0.929 0.542
District capital 0.068 0.080 –0.046 0.828 0.834 0.835
% change in population size 1980–88 –0.017 –0.013 –0.073 0.500 0.762 0.680
June 1953 protests 0.189 0.299 –0.304 0.487 0.215 0.753
Exit visas (per 1,000 residents) 3.269 3.274 –0.002 0.628 0.993 0.076
The table shows covariate balance for 217 East German counties with and without WGTV. The first two columns show means, the third
column shows differences in means standardized by the square root of the average variance, the fourth column shows variances in the WGTV
group divided by variances in the non-WGTV group, the fifth column shows p-values from two-sample t-tests, and the last column shows
p-values from bootstrapped Kolmogorov-Smirnoff tests of equality of distributions.

Germany, we also include two covariates that capture
county-level variation in social capital and social embedd-
edness. Informed by work on the long-term persistence
of patterns of cooperation and social capital (Putnam,
1993; Guiso, Sapienza & Zingales, 2008), we control for
historical antiregime collective action during the June
1953 East German uprising. We regard this covariate
as an (admittedly imperfect) proxy for social capital in
1989, although it might also capture time-invariant grie-
vances not captured by our socio-economic and relative
deprivation measures. The June 1953 protest data are
taken from Kowalczuk (2003) and represent the fraction
of municipalities in a county that experienced protests,
strikes, or attacks on representatives of the East German
regime during the uprising. Finally, we also control for
emigration levels just before the East German revolution
(January–August 1989) using data from Grundmann
(1997) to address the argument advanced by Pfaff & Kim
(2003) that there was a curvilinear relationship between
exit (emigration) and voice (protest) (see also Hirschman,
1993).
The first two columns of Table I show covariate
means for counties with and without WGTV, the third
column shows differences between covariate means stan-
dardized by the square root of the average variance, the
fourth column shows p-values from two-sample t-tests
and the last column shows p-values from bootstrapped
Kolmogorov-Smirnoff tests of equality of distributions.
For several of these covariates we see larger differences
between the two groups of counties than one would
expect by chance alone. Clearly, our natural experiment,
while providing us with variation in access to WGTV,
only imperfectly approximates a randomized experi-
ment. Our analyses will adjust for these systematic
differences.
Protest event data are taken from Schwabe (1999),
which provides a detailed country-wide compilation of
2,734 county-level protest events between 4 September
1989 and 18 March 1990, the date of the first free elec-
tion in East Germany. This compilation is based on
records of the East German Ministry of the Interior,
which assembled daily crisis reports submitted by local
278
police forces, the records of the Ministry of State Secu-
rity, and numerous published secondary sources. Our
outcome data thus avoid common problems with the
coding of protest events from news reports (Mueller,
1997; Baum & Zhukov, 2015); we are confident that
systematic measurement error is negligible here.
Figure 3 shows a heat map of protest counts. On aver-
age, counties with WGTV experienced about 12:9 pro-
test events, while counties without WGTV experienced
about 10:6 protest events. The raw data thus seem to
provide some face validity for the claim that WGTV
increased the likelihood of protest events. Of course,
given the systematic differences between counties with
and without WGTV documented in Table I, this differ-
ence hardly represents a credible estimate of the causal
effect of WGTV.
Given the spatial and temporal dimensions of our
data, a simple non-parametric comparison of counties
with and without WGTV is not feasible. Any robust
analysis of the impact of WGTV on the occurrence of
protest during the East German revolution will need to
account for both time- and space-dependency. More-
over, it will also have to account for systematic differ-
ences between counties with and without WGTV. We
therefore rely on a spatial survival model explaining the
risk and timing of protest events as a function of access
to WGTV, conditional on covariates. A critical feature
of the East German revolution was that East German
counties were at risk of experiencing multiple protests
over the course of the revolution, and, in fact, typically
did. As a consequence, a repeated events modeling
approach that accounts for the clustered nature of the
data is needed. Following the advice given by Box-
Steffensmeier & De Boef (2006), Box-Steffensmeier,
De Boef & Joyce (2007), and Box-Steffensmeier, Linn
& Smidt (2014), we employ a conditional frailty gap
time Cox model that allows us to simultaneously address
event dependence and heterogeneity.7
Moreover, in some models we will also investigate
the extent to which our results are robust to spatial
dependency (Darmofal, 2009). We do so through the
inclusion of a conditional spatial lag predictor vari-
able. Specifically, we include a temporally lagged spa-
tial lag variable that measures the proportion of
county i’s neighbors that experienced a protest event
during the preceding three days, during the preceding
seven days, or during the preceding two weeks. To
7
Please see the online appendix for a more detailed justification for
our choice of estimator.
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
the best of our knowledge, ours is the first analysis
that simultaneously accounts for spatial dependence,
event dependence, and heterogeneity within a
repeated events framework.
Results
Table II presents estimates from five Cox model specifi-
cations. The model in column 1 contains a dummy vari-
able for access to WGTV but no covariates or frailty
terms. Column 2 adds the covariates listed in Table I,
and column 3 also adds frailty terms to account for
unobserved heterogeneity across counties. Coefficient
estimates for covariates and frailty terms are not shown.
Exponentiating the coefficient estimate for WGTV gives
us the estimate of WGTV’s multiplicative effect on the
probability of a protest event occurring conditional on
covariates and frailties.8 Standard errors are shown in
brackets. Figure 4 graphically presents the estimates of
WGTV’s multiplicative effect based on the models in
Table II with 95% confidence intervals. In none of the
three models is the impact of WGTV statistically signif-
icant at the 0:05 level, and only in the model without
covariates or frailties is it significant at the 0:10 level.
This null result could be due to our focus on the East
German revolution in its entirety. If WGTV did have an
effect on protest activities, we would expect its impact to
decrease over time as East German media became more
independent from the East German regime and better
able to provide unbiased coverage of the mounting
regime crisis (Kern, 2011; Grdĕsić, 2014). Such a pat-
tern of decreasing WGTV effects would provide strong
evidence for the impact of WGTV, perhaps even more
convincing than if we had found a positive effect of
WGTV throughout the entire East German revolution.
Models 4 and 5 in Table II look at over-time hetero-
geneity in the effect of WGTV. The model in column 4
includes an interaction term between WGTV and a
dummy variable for the time period before the fall of the
Berlin Wall. The model in column 5 allows the effect of
WGTV to vary even more finely, by including interac-
tion terms between WGTV and dummy variables for
three time periods: 4 September to 18 October
(Through 18 October), 19 October to 31 October (Late
October), and 1–9 November (Early November). (The
omitted category is the period after the fall of the wall.)
These time periods roughly correspond to periods of
increased media freedom in East Germany (Kern,
8
For example, in column 3, exp(0.130) ≈ 1.139, for an approximate
13.9% increase in the probability of a protest event occurring.
Crabtree et al. 279

Table II. Effect of WGTV on probability of protest event from Cox models
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
WGTV 0:113y ½0:067 0:115 ½0:075 0:130 ½0:173 0:222 ½0:102 0:224 ½0:100
Wall 1:728 ½0:152
WGTV  Wall 0:099 ½0:151
Through 18 October 1:719 ½0:283
Late October 1:815 ½0:218
Early November 1:688 ½0:197
WGTV  Through 18 October 0:131 ½0:305
WGTV  Late October 0:058 ½0:222
WGTV  Early November 0:128 ½0:202
Covariates no yes yes yes yes
Frailties no no yes yes yes
Number of events 2,598 2,598 2,598 2,598 2,598
Number of observations 40,365 40,365 40,365 40,365 40,365
Log/I-likelihood 9,077 8,843 8,741 8,583 8,586
The table shows coefficient estimates from five Cox models, with standard errors in brackets. Wall corresponds to the period before the fall of
the Berlin Wall. yp < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.

Robustness
2.0

In this section of the article we subject our results to a

series of robustness checks. We start by investigating the
sensitivity of our results to spatial diffusion processes. In
1.5

areas of East Germany that had access to WGTV, both

WGTV and social networks could have served as coordi-
WGTV effect

nation devices for collective action by providing East

1.0

Germans with political information not available from

the state-controlled East German media. Survey data col-
lected by Opp and his colleagues (Opp & Gern, 1993;
Before Fall of Berlin Wall
After Fall of Berlin Wall

After Fall of Berlin Wall

Opp, Voss & Gern, 1993) indeed show that social net-
Through 18 October
0.5

Early November
Late October

works played a role in mobilizing the Leipzig protests. It

thus stands to reason that social networks could have
been an even more important source of political informa-
0.0

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

tion in parts of East Germany that did not have access to
WGTV. If social networks served as a substitute for
WGTV when WGTV was not available, the estimated
Figure 4. WGTV impact estimates from Models 1–5 in Table
II and 95% confidence intervals effect of WGTV would be biased downwards. We at
least partially control for this possibility by including
temporally lagged spatial lag variables that measure the
2011: 1185). Note that neither model shows heteroge- extent to which protest events triggered subsequent pro-
neity in the effect of WGTV.9 In both models, only the tests in neighboring counties. This strategy does not
impact estimates for the period after the fall of the wall directly capture the existence of social networks, a task
are statistically significant, which is the opposite of what for which we would need individual-level network data.
we would expect. Overall, the results presented so far do However, it does allow us to control for one important
not support the hypothesis that WGTV facilitated anti- effect of social networks, the spatial diffusion of collec-
regime protest in East Germany, in particular during the tive action (Gould, 1991).
early stages of the revolution. Table III shows impact estimates from five Cox mod-
els. Model 1 adds a temporally lagged spatial lag variable
9
The interaction term in Model 4 is not statistically significant. For to the baseline model in column 3 of Table II. This spa-
the model in column 5, we use a LR test to test for joint significance tial lag variable measures the proportion of a county’s
of the three interaction terms: w23 ¼ 0:539; p ¼ 0:910. neighboring counties that experienced a protest event
280 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)

Table III. Effect of WGTV on probability of protest event from Cox models: Accounting for spatial dependence and alternative
sources of political information
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
WGTV 0.105 [0.170] 0.091 [0.171] 0.103 [0.174] 0.097 [0.168] 0.103 [0.182]
Spatial lag three days yes no no yes no
Spatial lag seven days no yes no yes no
Spatial lag 14 days no no yes yes no
Poland border dummy no no no no yes
Trains dummy no no no no yes
Covariates yes yes yes yes yes
Frailties yes yes yes yes yes
Number of events 2,598 2,598 2,598 2,598 2,598
Number of observations 40,365 40,365 40,365 40,365 40,365
I-likelihood –8,693 –8,683 –8,724 –8,669 –8,740
The table shows coefficient estimates from five Cox models, with standard errors in brackets. yp < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.

Table IV. Effect of WGTV on probability of protest event from Cox models: Subsets of counties or events
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
WGTV 0.103 [0.175] 0.062 [0.254] 0.195 [0.237] 0.065 [0.186] 0.204y [0.122] –0.582* [0.347]
Omit East Berlin yes no no no no no
Omit southeast no yes no no no no
Omit northeast no no yes no no no
Omit neighbors no no no yes yes no
Best subset no no no no yes no
First events only no no no no no yes
Covariates yes yes yes yes yes yes
Frailties yes yes yes yes no yes
Number of events 2,521 2,458 2,476 2,340 585 207
Number of observations 40,170 38,220 37,830 36,465 9,165 11,700
I-likelihood –8,599 –8,163 –8,179 –7,592 –1,070 –842
The table shows coefficient estimates from six Cox models, with standard errors in brackets. yp < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.

on the preceding three days. Model 2 adds such a spatial
lag variable for the preceding seven days, and Model 3
does the same for the preceding 14 days. Model 4 simul-
taneously includes all three spatial lag variables. Across all
four models, the estimated impact of WGTV remains
small and statistically insignificant.
Model 5 controls for two alternative sources of polit-
ical information.10 First, the riots that took place when
the trains carrying embassy fugitives passed through East
Germany could have had a particularly strong impact on
East Germans’ awareness of the weakness of the commu-
nist regime. Second, in Poland the communist party was
ousted in early 1989. East Germans living close to the
Polish border might have been better informed about
these events than the average East German, which might
10
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these tests.
have increased their awareness of the weakness of com-
munist regimes more generally. We thus include dummy
variables for counties through which the trains passed as
well as counties bordering Poland. Neither of these pre-
dictors has a substantively or statistically significant
impact on protest events (results not shown); more
importantly, the effect of WGTV remains small and sta-
tistically insignificant.
Table IV shows that our results do not change when
we focus on specific subsamples of counties or when we
estimate the effect of WGTV on time to first event.
Model 1 in Table IV omits East Berlin from the sample.
This does not affect the WGTV estimate or its statistical
significance. Model 2 drops the non-WGTV counties in
the southeast from the sample and identifies the effect
of WGTV only using the non-WGTV counties in the
northeast. Model 3 does the reverse, dropping the non-
WGTV counties in the northeast from the sample but
Crabtree et al.
keeping the non-WGTV counties in the southeast. Even
though the counties in the agrarian northeast are quite dif-
ferent from the counties in the industrialized southeast,
both control groups generate small and statistically insig-
nificant WGTV effect estimates. Following Kern (2011),
Model 4 omits all WGTV counties that border at least
one non-WGTV county (22 counties in total). The effect
estimate remains small and statistically insignificant.
Model 5 uses a reduced sample chosen to maximize
the comparability of WGTV and non-WGTV counties
given the imbalances we saw earlier in Table I. As in
Model 4, we first dropped all WGTV counties bordering
non-WGTV counties. We then estimated propensity
scores using a probit model with all covariates entered
linearly and dropped all counties for which there was
no overlap in propensity score distributions (see Figure
A4 in the online appendix). This left us with 25 non-
WGTV counties  and 34 WGTV counties. We then
34
evaluated all  52:5 million samples that can
25
be generated by choosing (without replacement) 25
WGTV counties from the pool of 34 available WGTV
counties in terms of the maximum absolute standardized
difference in means across covariates. The sample with
the best balance between WGTV and non-WGTV
counties was used to estimate Model 5.11 In this sample
of highly comparable WGTV and non-WGTV counties,
the estimated WGTV effect is positive and statistically
significant at the 10% level.12
Finally, Model 6 restricts the sample to the first event
in each county, which addresses the concern that WGTV
might only have facilitated the first protest event in each
county. The WGTV estimate is statistically significant
at the 10% level but negative, implying that availability
of WGTV increased the time to first protest event.
Overall, based on the results presented in Tables II–
IV, we conclude that there is no robust empirical support
11
Balance is exceptional in this sample and much better than in Kern’s
(2011) matched sample. The maximum absolute standardized
difference in means across all covariates is just 0.131 standard
deviations; the average absolute standardized difference in means
across all covariates is 0.059 standard deviations. Finally, we also
estimated Cox models using the 100 best balanced samples among
the ≈ 52.5 million possible samples. Effect estimates for these 100
samples are shown in Figure A5 in the online appendix. WGTV
effect estimates are generally small and statistically insignificant.
12
Note, however, that for almost all other samples among the 100
best subsamples the estimated impact of WGTV is statistically
insignificant (see Figure A5 in the online appendix). We therefore
do not regard this result as providing strong support for a positive
impact of WGTV.
281
for the hypothesis that WGTV facilitated antiregime
protests, in particular during the early stages of the East
German revolution. This finding is robust to variation in
the time periods we looked at, spatial diffusion, the mea-
surement of WGTV availability, and the specific samples
of counties or events used in the estimations.
Discussion
Our finding that WGTV had no discernible impact on
protests during the East German revolution raises the
question of how protest was mobilized and spread so
swiftly across East Germany. One possibility that we
already alluded to earlier is social networks. Research has
shown that friendship and family ties (McAdam, 1986;
Gould, 1991) are important for protest mobilization.
For the East German revolution, Opp, Voss & Gern
(1993) and Opp & Gern (1993) have illuminated the
role social networks played in both increasing awareness
of the Monday demonstrations and motivating potential
participants to join. Moreover, formal work on high-risk
collective action suggests that merely having access to
politically relevant information, such as was provided
by WGTV, is not sufficient to convince people to partic-
ipate. When the personal risks associated with participa-
tion in collective action are high, as they undoubtedly
were during the early stages of the East German revolu-
tion, resolving coordination dilemmas requires multiple
interpersonal contacts who reinforce the normative
importance of taking action (Centola & Macy, 2007).
WGTV did supply the political information that the lit-
erature on ‘revolutionary bandwagons’ has identified as a
crucial ingredient in revolutionary collective action. But
perhaps the impersonal supply of information by mass
media cannot rival friendship and family ties that not
only transmit information about successful protests in
other places but also persuade individuals to risk their
lives in support of a common cause.
In many respects, WGTV in East Germany was a
‘most likely’ case for the impact of foreign media on anti-
regime collective action in authoritarian regimes. For
one, there were no significant language or cultural bar-
riers between East and West Germans. Moreover,
WGTV, which was extremely popular in East Germany
(Kern & Hainmueller, 2009), devoted a great deal of
attention to East German politics even before the out-
break of the East German revolution. It is therefore not
surprising that WGTV has been heralded as a prime
example of the influence of foreign mass media on tran-
sitions to democracy. Yet given our inability to find
empirical support for the claim that WGTV played an
282
important role in mobilizing antiregime protests in this
case, we are somewhat wary of broad claims that commu-
nication technology can facilitate collective action in other
cases. At the same time, recent work by Adena et al.
(2013) on the effects of Nazi radio propaganda and Sha-
piro & Weidmann’s (2015) research on the impact of cel-
lular networks in Iraq convincingly demonstrate that
horizontal and vertical communication technologies can
sometimes affect collective action (in perhaps unexpected
ways). While calls for further research have become a
cliche, we do believe that the impact of communication
technology on collective action is one area in which such
calls are justified and where further research is needed.
Even though arguments linking communication technol-
ogy to collective action are plausible enough, the question
probably cannot be settled by relying on cross-national
evidence alone. Detailed case studies with credible causal
identification strategies are needed to pin down the effects,
or lack of effects, of communication technologies on col-
lective action.
Replication data
All statistical analyses were done using R 3:0:3. The
online appendix as well as the dataset, codebook, and
do-files for the empirical analyses in this article can be
found at http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Siegfried Grundmann and Steven
Pfaff for sharing data. We also thank William Lynn
Shirley and Kevin Remington of the Department of
Geography at the University of South Carolina and
Yosef Bodovski of the Population Research Institute
at Penn State University for providing invaluable GIS
assistance. Giovanni Zambotti of the Center for Geo-
graphic Analysis at Harvard University graciously
allowed us to use the Communication System Plan-
ning Tools ArcGIS extension. Julie Kubrick of the
Institute for Telecommunication Sciences helped
direct our efforts at an early stage. Ben Olken and
Ruben Enikolopov generously shared advice and soft-
ware. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Kyle Joyce, and
Suzanna Linn provided extremely helpful advice with
regards to our spatial survival model. Allan Dafoe,
Jason Lyall, and Nils B Weidmann offered extremely
useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Any
remaining errors are our own. All authors contributed
equally and are listed alphabetically.
journal of PEACE RESEARCH 52(3)
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CHARLES CRABTREE, b. 1983, MPPA (Northwestern
University, 2012); PhD student in Political Science (2013– ),
Pennsylvania State University; research interests: authoritarian
regimes, mass media, and social movements.
DAVID DARMOFAL, b. 1968, PhD in Political Science
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003);
Associate Professor, University of South Carolina;
research interests: political behavior and political
methodology.
HOLGER L KERN, b. 1976, PhD in Government
(Cornell University, 2008); Assistant Professor, Florida
State University; research interests: domestic politics of
authoritarian regimes, democratization, mass media, and
causal inference in observational and experimental
studies.