No abstract

In recent years, the question of what form a revolutionary uprising will take – armed or unarmed – has been raised more often. This is because, as shown by numerous studies, revolutionary nonviolence can explain why an uprising fails or succeeds to lead to democracy. 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. Moreover, there are only a few quantitative cross-national studies on this topic, in which the authors tried to explain the apparent pattern. However, none of them considered political factors separately. This article tests the hypothesis that a country’s level of democracy can inhibit the armed revolutionary violence. By applying logistic regression to the NAVCO database, the authors analyze more than 400 revolutionary episodes and conclude that, in general, the more democratic the political system, the more likely the revolution take an unarmed form. Nevertheless, various revolutionary events could be of a rather different nature, and it is further shown that the level of democracy matters only for sociopolitical revolutions, while for ethno-separatist revolutions it does not play a significant role.

<p>  </p> <p>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, revolutionary nonviolence can explain why the uprising failed or succeed to lead to democracy. 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. Moreover, there are only a few quantitative cross-national studies on this topic, in which the authors tried to explain the apparent pattern. However, none of them considered political factors separately. This paper tests the hypothesis that a country's level of democracy can inhibit the spread of revolutionary violence. By applying logistic regression to the NAVCO database, we analyze 400 episodes and conclude that, in general, the more democratic the political system, the more likely the revolution take a nonviolent form. Nevertheless, the various revolutionary events could be of a rather different nature, and it is further shown that the level of democracy matters only for sociopolitical revolutions, while for separatist revolutions it does not play a significant role. In other words, democracy can stop effectively violence only in revolutionary episodes caused by sociopolitical (but not ethno-nationalist) grievances. </p>

Despite the existence of numerous hypotheses about what factors influence protesters’ choice of armed vs. unarmed struggle tactics, today there is a dearth of global, quantitative cross-national studies aimed at identifying the reasons why revolutions take a violent vs. a non-violent form. The article attempts to fill one of the gaps existing here by conducting a crossnational analysis of the relationship between education and the type of revolutionary action. Based on the existing literature, the authors document several mechanisms that nudge educated people to choose unarmed forms of protest. In particular, education makes people more receptive to liberal-democratic valu es (including recognition and respect for the rights of others), promotes the development of tolerance and a culture of peaceful discussion, as well as increases human capital, which, on the one hand, makes it possible to successfully use non-violent instruments to defend one’s interests, and, on the other hand, increases the relative costs of participating in armed uprisings. Hence, the authors put forward a hypothesis, according to which in countries with a higher percentage of the population with formal education, the likelihood of armed revolutionary uprisings will decrease. The analysis of 387 revolutionary events that took place in the world from 1950 to 2019 conducted via cross-tabulation, correlation and regression methods, fully confirms the hypothesis: high level of education is indeed a strong and significant predictor of the unarmed nature of revolutionary upheavals. The correlation is especially high between the proportion of revolutionary events and the average number of years of schooling (in the logged form), which approaches the level of functional depen dence. Therefore, the factor of education has the maximum influence on the nature of revolutionary uprisings precisely in the early stages of modernization.

Although there are plenty of quantitative cross-national analyses on the influence of population age structure on revolutionary risks, there are currently not enough studies that examine its impact on the risks of armed and unarmed revolutions taken separately. Assuming that the dependence of potential political destabilization on the median age will differ for armed and unarmed revolutions, we propose the following hypothesis. High median age and the level of a country’s economic development will negatively correlate with armed revolutions. A moderately young median age will have positive influence on the risks of non-violent rebellions, while the overall dependence of unarmed revolutions on median age will be slightly positive and curvilinear. Relying on materials from NAVCO 1.3 and the UN Population Division databases and by means of utilizing cross-tabulations, correlations and logistic regression, we analyze about 250 revolutionary episodes between 1950 and 2019. All of our hypotheses turn out to be supported. The higher the median age of the population — the less likely the occurrence will be of armed revolutionary instability. On the other hand, as the population ages, the risks of unarmed revolutionary actions first grow, but then decline.