Women’s Right to Drive: Spillover of Brokers, Mobilization, and Cyberactivism

Abstract

The advent of modern forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as social media, have modified the ways people communicate, connect, and diffuse information. Social media has played an unprecedented role in coordinating and mobilization of social movements. Further, cross-influence among social movements has been observed during the 2011 Arab Spring, ongoing Saudi Women’s movements against inequitable gender laws, and other social movements. Moreover, this has been a topic of research in the social movement spillover literature, where resource sharing, spillover of activists, supporters, and coalitions within social movements have been the focus of these studies. However, much of the work published in this area dates back to the 1960s. It is crucial to re-evaluate traditional theories of spillover in the modern ICT landscape. The evolution of Internet-driven collective actions triggered the examination and discovery of some essential factors of spillover remaining theoretically underdeveloped and call for innovative fundamental research that can provide observations in reconceptualizing spillover effects in online environments. In this research, we examine three campaigns during 2013 of the ongoing women’s right to drive movement, namely the ‘October 26 Driving Campaign’, the ‘November 31 Driving Campaign’, and the ‘December 28 Driving Campaign’. By analyzing the Twitter data on the networks of the three campaigns, we identify the factors that help us study spillover between the campaigns. We aim to assess social movement spillover effects by identifying – (1) common activists and supporters, (2) the inter-campaign brokers/coalitions, and (3) the diffusion of hashtags and other resources. We envision the findings of this study to shed insights on information diffusion and mutual influence across movements and provide a deeper understanding of interconnected social movements.