Internet Coverage and the Occurrence of Protest

This chapter presents an empirical first look at the relationship between Internet technology and protest occurrence at the level of cities. The authors argue that the expansion of Internet coverage should lower the incidence rate of anti-regime protest: governments enjoy a high level of control over Internet technology and content, which they can use to prevent protest. Building on the book’s research design introduced in Chapter 4, the chapter tests this theoretical expectation by presenting descriptive statistics and later by estimating multilevel regression models. In line with the authors’ argument, the analysis reveals a negative effect of Internet penetration on protest incidence. In other words, high Internet penetration in a given city reduces the likelihood of anti-regime protest incidence in autocracies. This effect is robust across a number of different model specifications and time periods.