Lustick, Miodownik / Neighborhoods and Tips
2
The dynamics of political cascades and the role of tipping points can often be of
central importance for policy makers and for those seeking to interpret or anticipate
patterns of political change. The eruption of revolutionary change in Iran in the late
1970s brought radical anti-American Islamists to power in that country. The Palestinian
intifada in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987 seemed to Israelis and most observers to
come out of nowhere--a seemingly disciplined mobilization with no central leadership
that brought an end to the expectations of many Israelis that those territories were being
successfully absorbed by Israel. These events, along with the sudden overthrow of
communist regimes in a series of rapidly crystallizing popular mobilizations in Eastern
Europe in 1989 and the Tienanmen demonstrations in China in that same year dramatized
the importance of understanding the sources and dynamics of radical, sudden
transformations. More recently, failure to appreciate the conditions that produce or
inhibit political cascades contributed to incorrect predictions that an American invasion
of Iraq would unleash cascades of support among downtrodden Iraqis during the actual
fighting and that military victory in Iraq would trigger cascades toward democratization
in that country and, indeed, across the Middle East. Equally revealing is the failure to
anticipate kind of cascade toward violent insurgency in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq that
does not appear to be the result of a carefully planned or centrally directed strategy.
Gaining traction on the problem of explaining (and perhaps, eventually,
predicting) when and where political eruptions will occur first requires the precise
definition of terms. We define a "political cascade" as a radiating pattern of
transformation in behavior across a large population involving an accelerating change
in available information about the future condition of the population. We define a “tip”
Convention