Revolutions and Democracy

What is it about?

In recent years, the question of what form a revolutionary uprising will take — armed or unarmed — has been raised more and more often. This is because, as shown by numerous studies, nonviolent revolutions are much more likely to lead to democracy than armed uprisings. In the recent decades the likelihood of revolution being nonviolent appears to have significantly increased, but it is still not clear why this tendency is observed. We test the hypothesis that the higher a country's level of democracy, the higher the likelihood that the revolutionary events in it will be nonviolent. We analyze more than 400 revolutionary episodes and find that, indeed, the more democratic the political system, the more likely the revolution will take a nonviolent form. _x000D_ _x000D_ This suggests the existence of a positive feedback between democratization and revolutionary nonviolence. Thus, democratization leads to revolutionary nonviolence, which, in turn, leads to even greater democratization, which in turn results in more revolutionary nonviolence, and so on. In fact, this mechanism might contribute to the explanation of the overall global trend towards democratization. We also show that the more modernized society is (more wealthy, more educated, more urbanized, with older population), the higher the probability that the uprising will be unarmed. There is clearly a cluster of variables, that move mostly together and create characteristic patterns of revolutionary action and outcomes.

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