Social Media, Spillover, and Saudi Arabian Women's right to drive movements: Analyzing interconnected online collective actions

The advent of modern forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as social media, has modified the ways people communicate and enables an inimitable way of connectivity promoting the advancement and diffusion of information. Given that, individuals within social movements bringing influence from other movements makes the study of spillover within social movements an important concentration for sociologists and others studying collective action (CA). This research explores the role of social movement spillover in investigating and sustaining the Women's Right to Drive movement in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We benefit from various models of established collective action theories developed in the pre-Internet era, and re-evaluate traditional theories of spillover within the modern ICT landscape by utilizing existing collective action theories/approaches and novel and innovative computational analytical tools. The findings of this study are conceptualized to shed new insights on information diffusion, mutual influence, role distribution analysis of activists/supporters across movements and provide a deeper understanding of interconnected social movements and social movement spillover. Applying computational metrics to measure the strength of spillover and its effects on complex social processes enable novel model development to help advance the understanding of interconnected collective actions conducted through modern social and information systems.