Mass media and the diffusion of collective action in authoritarian regimes: the June 1953 East German uprising

A growing literature attributes the rapid diffusion of domestic collective mobilization against authoritarian regimes to foreign mass media broadcasts. We examine this relationship in the context of the June 17, 1953, uprising in East Germany, the first national rebellion against communist rule in Eastern Europe. The uprising involved an extraordinarily swift and wide-ranging diffusion of antiregime collective action. Observers on both sides of the Iron Curtain attributed the revolt to Western media broadcasts, particularly news broadcasts by the Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) of Berlin. While historians have strongly endorsed this view, social scientists have never quantitatively tested it. We investigate the potential relationship between municipality-level protest events and RIAS broadcasts by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in RIAS signal strength across East Germany. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that RIAS caused the diffusion of protest during the uprising. Instead, our results suggest that social ties likely played an important, and underrecognized, role in the swift diffusion of antiregime collective action.