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Media Ecologies of Diffusion: A Spatial Durbin Approach to the Contagion of Labor Protests in China

Fri, May 25, 14:00 to 15:15, Hilton Prague, Floor: L, Barcelona

Abstract

Media and communication technologies effectively facilitate the border-crossing spread of protest information, raising the chances of motivating and mobilizing people elsewhere into the protest wave. Extant studies about mediated diffusion suffer shortcomings of “one-medium bias” and “one-way transmission bias”. Following a tradition of holistic analysis which sees media infrastructure as media ecologies for social protests, a spatial Durbin approach is taken to generate insights into different impacts of three media modes—the number of newspaper and magazine subscribed, the popularization rate of broadband subscribers of Internet, as well as long-distance telecommunications—on the dissemination of industrial strikes. A 31×5 panel data of labor protests is used, which covering strikes occurred in 31 administrative units in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) during 2011-2015. The empirical findings also support that strike diffusion of a certain region is associated with media ecologies of its neighbors beyond its own media ecology.

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