The dynamics of informational cascades: the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91.

Democrats (SPD), the Communists (SED, later renamed PDS), and other parties in a sequence of public opinion polls and elections. The CDU became increasingly popular among demonstrators, and this trend was subsequently replicated in the population, culminating in the CDU's unexpectedly large electoral success in March 1990. Similarly, the demonstrators anticipated the rise and decline of the SPD's popularity in the population. Not surprisingly, sympathizers of the SED/PDS were highly underrepresented at the demonstrations. The demonstrators and the population shared similar preferences for the smaller parties and groups.

The demonstrations also led public opinion with regard to the rise and decline of the popularity of several East and West German political leaders. ON October 6, 1989, the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with official parades and orchestrated proregime demonstrations. Erich Honecker, the general secretary of the SED, proclaimed the founding of the republic a "historical necessity" and a "turning point in the history of the German people."(1) Twelve days later, on October 18, Honecker resigned. On November 9 the Berlin Wall fell. Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, when the five East German states acceded to its West German counterpart, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

During this period of political turmoil, the city of Leipzig in Saxony became known as the Heldenstadt (city of heroes).(2) Mass demonstrations in Leipzig on thirteen consecutive Mondays between September 25, and December 18, 1989, triggered a wave of political protest throughout the GDR. The demonstrators expressed their demands for political liberalization, open borders, and, toward the end of the cycle, German unification. A second set of demonstrations began on January 8, and ended on March 12, 1990. The participants initially called for speedy unification. Later on political parties used the Monday demonstrations as a campaign platform for the first free national elections, held on March 18, 1990. Three more "cycles of protest" took place in fall 1990 and in early 1991.(3) At this time organized groups attempted to exploit the symbolic force of the earlier Monday demonstrations to protest the lack of public access to state security files, the Persian Gulf War, and the negative economic and social consequences of German unification. However, the early momentum was gone, and the demonstrations failed.

Western observers were initially stunned at the speed of the economic and political collapse of the East German regime. With hindsight, however, the regime's economic collapse seems to have been inevitable, given its outdated and obsolete industrial structure and the depleted state of its environment. Similarly, the political fate of the regime appears to have been sealed once its repressive state security network unraveled.

I propose that this peculiar combination of surprise and inevitability is due to the dispersed nature of information about the GDR's precarious economic and political situation. The East German populace was by and large discontent with its standard of living and lack of political freedoms, and it grew increasingly so in the period 1975-89. But this disaffection had no outlet: all avenues by which it could have been made public, and thereby induced political change, were blocked. While elections were held regularly, there was no opposition party, and election outcomes were manipulated. Periodic intraparty purges effectively eliminated any opposition within the ruling party. The freedom of press, radio, and television guaranteed in Article 27 of the GDR constitution was a farce: news publications and broadcasts were controlled by the department for agitation and propaganda of the central committee of the SED. The violent suppression of the 1953 mass uprising with the help of Soviet military forces rendered the cost of anti-regime protest prohibitive for all but a small minority. Similarly, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 eliminated the option of emigration for the vast majority of the population. Public opinion polls that indicated a dramatic decrease in public support for the regime in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s were classified and not accessible to anyone but high-level functionaries. The people's silent discontent and lack of motivation contributed to the poor performance of the East German economy but failed to be reflected in the unrealistically rosy picture drawn by official aggregate economic statistics.

A number of critical events in the late 1980s finally brought to the fore the regime's heavy-handed and manipulative control of its people and contributed to the general sense of anger, bitterness, and frustration. In addition, the external constraints faced by the regime and its citizens changed dramatically. Gorbachev's political reforms in the Soviet Union sowed discontent among the East German people, as they cast doubt on the Soviet commitment to guarantee the existence of the East German regime and thereby lowered the cost of protest. They also liberalized a number of Eastern bloc countries that opened their borders to the West, thus creating a low-cost emigration opportunity for citizens of the GDR vacationing in those countries.

The hard-line leadership of the SED showed no signs of giving in to the pressures generated by the exodus of its citizens via other East European countries in the summer of 1989. But for those who remained trapped in the GDR, the emigration of their compatriots served as a signal. First thousands, then tens and hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Leipzig, triggering a wave of mass demonstrations in cities and townships all over the GDR. In response, a reform-minded faction emerged to succeed to the SED leadership and initiate a number of political reforms. The resulting political liberalization created its own dynamics. Once free from state control, the media fed public outrage with its reports on environmental damage, political repression, corruption, and the luxurious lifestyles of the SED elite. Similarly, the legalization of opposition groups and political parties created pressures for free elections. Most important, the official opening of the East German borders to the West led to a flood of additional emigration that ultimately unraveled the regime: German unification became necessary to bring the exodus down to manageable levels.

In this sequence of events, the Leipzig Monday demonstrations played a key role in the transformation and eventual collapse of the regime. This analysis interprets the demonstrations as an "informational cascade" that finally made public some of the previously hidden information about the nature of the regime.(4) With this information in the public domain the viability of the regime was undermined. The Monday demonstrations, too, subsequently died a slow death as their informational role declined.

This article is organized as follows. Section I reviews several theories of mass political action. Section II examines the suppression of mass discontent in East Germany over the period 1949-89, as well as the critical events and external political changes of the late 1980s. Section III analyzes the East German revolution and its aftermath, covering forty-two Monday demonstrations in Leipzig over the period 1989-91. Section IV uses the evidence assembled in Sections II and III to evaluate the theories reviewed in Section I.

I. THEORIES OF MASS POLITICAL ACTION

This section first summarizes two influential theories of how popular disaffection with a regime can translate into mass protest and induce political change: the theory of relative deprivation and the theory of political opportunity structure.(5) Then some traditional threshold and cascade models of collective action are outlined(6) and contrasted with an informational cascade model of mass political action.(7) Finally, the section reviews the work of several scholars who emphasize the role of social embeddedness, personal networks, organized groups, and political leadership for mass mobilization.(8)

TRADITIONAL MODELS

A grievance-based theory provides the starting point for the literature review. According to Ted Robert Gurr's concept of relative deprivation, people become discontent when they perceive a discrepancy between their expectations and society's ability to ensure the standard of living to which they believe they are rightfully entitled. This type of discontent spurs revolution.

The theory of political opportunity structure is based on the notion that people become active not when they are most deprived, oppressed, or discontent, but when a closed system of opportunities opens up. Sidney Tarrow interprets cycles of protest as collective responses to expanding political opportunities that arise when exogenous events increase the expected payoffs from participation.

Whereas these two theories focus on political action as the primary mode for expressing mass discontent, Albert O. Hirschman's theory of exit, voice, and loyalty identifies several ways that popular disaffection with a regime can induce political change. In its original formulation, his theory is applied to the interaction between customers and a firm in the economic marketplace. Consumers can respond in two ways to a deterioration in the quality of the product: they can shift their demand to the products of another firm (exit); or they can file complaints with the management of the firm (voice). If a sufficiently large number of people take the exit option, the firm will go bankrupt unless it improves the quality of its products fast enough to reverse the exit behavior. The voice option also has a potential to induce an improvement of the firm's products but without threatening to drive the firm into bankruptcy. The likelihood of voice increases with the degree of customer loyalty to the firm's product.

Hirschman's framework sheds light on the situation in which people dissatisfied with the performance of their government can choose to emigrate (exit) or participate in an uprising against the regime (voice), thereby bringing about the collapse of the government or inducing political and economic reforms.(9)

A natural extension of Hirschman's framework allows for some interdependence between the customers' decisions. In many applications, the benefits any one individual derives from consuming the products of a firm increase with the number of other individuals who do likewise. If some customers shift their demand to the products of a competitor, their exit actions may affect the behavior of other consumers who were initially satisfied with the firm's products. Similarly, if customer complaints about the firm's products become public, other consumers may take informational cues from the aggregate number of complaints to draw inferences about…