Contagion : protests that rebel against borders

Abstract

This paper focuses on the subject of protest’s international diffusion given the rising levels of production of protests by Latin American countries in the last few years. We consider a protest as public demonstration of disapproval or objection to an official policy. We find a positive association in the production of protests between countries and cannot discard the possibility of contagion amongst them. Using contiguity matrices borrowed from the spatial econometrics literature we find that for contemporaneous protests, news transmitted via the internet are the most likely means of transmission in most countries. Regarding lagged news reports, we find that trade and, to a lesser extent, border proximity become more important. More research is necessary to discern causality.