(This originally appeared as “Why Democracy Will Win” on the Reuters Commentary Wire.) The Day of Rage in Saudi Arabia was a tepid affair, and Libyan rebels have suffered strategic losses. Only two months ago, popular uprisings in Tunisia inspired Egyptians and others to take to the streets to demand political [...]
Philip N. Howard, Laura Busch, Dawn Nafus, and Ken Anderson. “Sizing up Information Societies—Towards a Better Metric for the Cultures of ICT Adoption.” The Information Society 25, no. 3 (2009): 208-19. When researchers study technology diffusion in a global and comparative manner, they often find that economic productivity explains differences in the [...]
Philip N. Howard and Nimah Mazaheri. “Telecommunications Reform, Internet Use and Mobile Phone Adoption in the Developing World.” World Development 37, no. 7 (2009): 1159-69. How do telecommunications policies influence technology adoption? Has regulatory reform helped mitigate or exacerbate the digital divide? We examine the effects of four policy reform strategies on [...]
This Working Paper appears on the website of the World Information Access Project. As we analyze the use of the concept of internet diffusion found in economics, political science, and public policy research in this paper, we find that the research on internet diffusion is often characterized by extensive errors [...]
Philip N. Howard, “Testing the Leap-Frog Hypothesis: Assessing the Impact of Extant Infrastructure and Telecommunication Policy on the Global Digital Divide.” Information, Communication & Society 10, no. 2 (2007): 133-57. This paper tests the ‘leap-frog’ hypothesis by modeling the impact of existing telecommunications infrastructure, controlling for economic, political and demographic [...]
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