Communication Technology Environments and Political Conflict

Abstract

How does communication technology shape political conflict? While much can be learned from studying the local effects of the introduction of a particular device, in this dissertation I present a broader theoretical view and an eclectic set of empirical studies. I argue that, in fact, communication technology environments suffuse the politics of conflict at multiple levels: influencing the strategic choices of opposing groups, shaping the cognition of individuals learning about political tension, and altering the distribution of the social identities around which people organize. In Chapter 1, I make a theoretical case that communication—and by extension communication technology—plays an important role in the social construction of key features (actors, issues, estimation, and strategy) common to multiple types of conflict. Chapter 2 offers an image—the communication technology environment—that exists relative to a level of analysis (e.g., the individual or the state) and is the holistic suite of technologically enabled affordances that facilitate and constrain the transmission of information. As an example of how to operationalize the concept, I introduce the Communication Technology Environment Dataset (CTED), which includes all country-years from 1946 to 2019 and draws on administrative data about the prevalence of technologies from telegraphy, to television, to mobile broadband internet. The dataset allows scholars to functionally characterize the social and mobilizational affordances of these communication technologies, for example by grouping them into indices by network topology or engineering modality. Chapter 3 examines the rise of nonviolent resistance to the state. I make the case that the increased density of communication technologies associated with one-to-one and one-to-many networks favors the emergence of nonviolent movements, and I find support for my hypotheses using data from the CTED. Chapter 4 zooms in, focusing on an understudied feature of individuals’ communication technology environments: brevity. I develop a theory linking brevity (such as we might find if learning about international politics on social media) to overconfidence—the belief that one knows more than one actually does. I test this theory with three online survey experiments spanning five samples across three countries (the US, the UK, and Australia; total N = 7,408) in which members of the public are exposed to information about important foreign policy issues. These experiments provide evidence that less information induces more overconfidence about international politics. Having examined how communication technology shapes strategy and estimation, Chapter 5 tackles the link between communication technology and political identity. I theorize that analog communication technologies reinforce territorial political identities while digital communication technologies create an environment more conducive to non-territorial identities. I evaluate this theory using an agent-based model and a mosaic of observational evidence, including patterns of publication names, statements of identity in published books, and the content of political party manifestos. Taken together, these chapters show the utility of the communication technology environment as an analytical lens that can yield novel empirical insights about how communication technology alters the contours of different types of political conflict at multiple levels of analysis.