The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Published 14 May 2019
I keep telling people this. To add, armed conflicts have a nasty habit of hardening a country. Getting rights back after it's over is a pain, even if the "good guys" win. If you can manage change by overwhelming numbers in the street then it's far better.
These percentages are BS without context.
- 50% of the population could go out for a single day protest. Nothing changes
- 10% of the population could do daily protests. Nothing changes.
- 3% of the population could shut down the country, all hell breaks loose. maybe change maybe not.
- 1% of the population declares war. Remembered for a thousand years.
And even the larger peaceful protests can really change things if they have concrete and achievable political goals.
It’s not the size, it’s how you use it
It’s not the size, it’s how you use it
😏
I wonder what our Revolution of Dignity would fall under.
At the peak, I believe Kyiv alone had 500K protesters (with many regional centres also being major protest hotspots). But we also had armed rebellion closer to the presidential office in Feb 2014.
In Chenoweth’s data set, it was only once the nonviolent protests had achieved that 3.5% threshold of active engagement that success seemed to be guaranteed – and raising even that level of support is no mean feat. In the UK it would amount to 2.3 million people actively engaging in a movement (roughly twice the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city); in the US, it would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.
A quick search suggests US has twice achieved the 3.5% threshold, the record being in 2020 with the George Floyd protests (15M to 25M) and Earth Day in 1970 with 20M protesters (assuming this was the biggest US protest in recent history on a population adjusted level).
Perhaps the difference relative to other countries was that Americans didn't explicitly protest for removal of the existing regime.
Perhaps the difference relative to other countries was that Americans didn't explicitly protest for removal of the existing regime.
No, it's that the 3.5% rule requires that those 3.5% be consistently engaged and willing to escalate, and BLM was not that.
So is Trunp and his whole admin gonna step down now?