The 3.5% rule is a concept in political science that states that when 3.5% of the population of a country protest nonviolently against an authoritarian government, that government is likely to fall from power. The rule was formulated by Erica Chenoweth in 2013. It arose out of insights originally published by political scientist Mark Lichbach in 1995 in his book The Rebel's Dilemma: Economics, Cognition, and Society. Other scholars have criticized the dataset used to construct these findings for being too narrow in scope, though that dataset has been expanded since the rule's original formulation.
Formulation
Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied the success rates of civil resistance efforts from 1900 to 2006, focusing on the major violent and nonviolent efforts to bring about regime change during that time. To be classified as successful, a movement had to achieve its aims within one year of peak turnout, and had to satisfy strict criteria for nonviolence. By comparing the success rates of 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns, Stephan and Chenoweth demonstrated that only 26% of violent revolts were successful, whereas...
Ketakater
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