Revolutions and Democracy. Why Do Revolutions Take Armed or Unarmed Form?
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 a large number of studies, nonviolence can explain why the uprising failed or came to success. So, with the beginning of the 21st century, the number of unarmed and successful revolutions is growing, but it is still not clear why this occurs. Moreover, there are only a few quantitative cross-national papers on this topic, in which the authors tried to explain the apparent pattern. However, none of them considered political factors separately. In this paper, the hypothesis is that the country's democracy and the inclusiveness of governance institutions are the determining factors for answering the question: will the revolution be bloody or peaceful? At the same time, it is expected that, on the one hand, the more democratic the country is, and, on the other, the smaller the share of the discriminated population, the more likely a revolution will be unarmed. However, it is important to understand that different types of uprisings differ significantly from each other. So, by exploiting logistic models, it was found that when analyzing all revolutions together, it is democracy that is the main predictor, while the level of discrimination is not so strong. However, if we consider only the national liberation (separatist) revolutions, it turns out that democracy does not play any role in determining the tactics of the protesters, while ethnic discrimination appears to be a very significant factor. On the contrary, within socioeconomic revolutions (non-separatist) discrimination is not significant, while the level of democracy has a direct and strong influence on the degree of violence. Thus, all our hypotheses have been supported: despite the apparent similarity, the level of a country's democracy and the degree of discrimination turn out to be qualitatively independent predictors when answering the question - will the revolution be armed or not?
Keywords
democracy,
armed revolutions,
unarmed revolutions,
discriminationAuthors
| Ustyuzhanin Vadim V. | Higher School of Economics | vvustiuzhanin@yandex.ru |
| Korotayev Andrey V. | Higher School of Economics; Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences | akorotayev@gmail.com |
Всего: 2
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