Now Out of Never

Kuran, T. (1991). Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989. World Politics, 44(1), 7-48.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1991

DOI

10.2307/2010422

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/2010422

Cited from

chemistry_materials, communication_media_studies, economics_finance, political_science, psychology

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Common Knowledge
  • Linguistics and pragmatics — shared context, conventions, and conversational presupposition rest on what speakers can take to be common ground; reference, metaphor, and irony all assume specific common-knowledge scaffolds. Social norms and conventions — a norm becomes binding only once compliance is common knowledge, which is why public rituals (parades, anthems, televised events) generate it: everyone sees everyone else seeing the same thing. Revolutions and collective action — mass mobilization cascades after a single visible breach of a regime's appearance of invincibility, because the breach lifts shared dissent onto the top rung.

    This sourceExplains how a visible breach of a regime's appearance of invincibility lifts shared private dissent to common knowledge, triggering mobilization cascades.

• Metastability
  • Sociopolitics — authoritarian regimes that look stable for decades and then collapse in weeks; norms held by mutual conformity even when nearly everyone privately dissents (preference falsification); ceasefires that hold until they don't.
• Preference Falsification
  • At a regime-organised rally, a small section of the crowd began to boo; this visible defection broke the perceived cost structure, and the booing spread through tens of thousands in minutes as each person who had been falsifying saw both that defection was now possible and that they were not alone.

    This sourceAnalyzes the 1989 Eastern European collapses as preference cascades, including the sudden surfacing of long-falsified opposition once a visible defection breaks the cost structure.

• Private-Public Preference Divergence
  • In authoritarian politics and public opinion, it is the propped-up unpopular regime, policy, or leader: citizens privately opposed who, seeing uniform public compliance, believe the opposition is a fringe and themselves isolated — the engineered version is manufactured consent, where the state controls the visible signal (rallies, state media, who is seen to dissent) so that the public distribution is fabricated rather than merely misread, and the gap's sudden release is the preference cascade of a revolution, the apparent regime that "everyone secretly opposed" surfacing in days once defection becomes visible (the 1989 Eastern European collapses are textbook releases of a long-suppressed held distribution).
• Spiral Of Silence In Publics
  • The recurring pattern of sudden preference cascades — the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of an authoritarian leader, a viral reckoning, a sudden brand collapse — is recognizable as the back-end of a spiral: when the perceived climate flips, the cost structure inverts and the previously-silent surge into expression, producing the apparent overnight reversal.

    This sourceExplains sudden preference cascades (e.g., the collapse of communist regimes) as the release of long-suppressed expression once the perceived climate flips — the spiral's back-end phase reversal.

• Supersaturation
  • In politics, opinion drifted past the level of articulated public expression — held by preference falsification or fear of social cost — discharges as rapid mobilisation once a defection lowers the cost of expression.

    This sourcePreference-falsification model in which suppressed opinion (the stored gap) discharges as rapid mobilization once a visible defection lowers the cost of expression — the social analogue of nucleation-triggered release.

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