The impact of foreign media on political mobilization during the Arab Spring

Abstract

We investigate how foreign media influenced political mobilization during the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Focusing on two prominent transnational networks, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, we use Arab Barometer survey data to track political mobilization and media use indicators in Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories. To address potential endogeneity, we use the frequency of lightning strikes and submarine cable seaquake shocks as instrumental variables, which help isolate exogenous variation in access to foreign media. Our results show that access to foreign media has a positive and statistically significant effect on political mobilization. A one-standard-deviation increase corresponds to a rise in the likelihood of participating in protests of approximately 6.5 percentage points, a gain of approximately 39% at the sample mean. We argue that this effect is primarily driven by the informational dimension of foreign media, rather than its ideological content