From 1900 to 2006, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies.
Obvious-looking alternative to the interpretation I take it they have in mind: One of the factors that makes a campaign turn to violence is a sense that other means won’t get them what they want. Imagine a toy world in which there are causes with success probabilities ranging from 0 to 1, and ones whose success probability is <0.1 turn to violence, and doing so makes them 3x more likely to succeed. And imagine (toy world, remember) that these success probabilities are uniformly distributed. Then the typical nonviolent campaign succeeds 55% of the time, and the typical violent campaign only 15% of the time—but that doesn’t mean the violent campaigns should have stayed nonviolent to maximize their chances of success.
A good point to keep in mind, though it looks like Erica Chenoweth has tried to address it:
In my book with Maria Stephan, we devote an entire quantitative chapter (where we use multiple two-stage models identifying both the choice of NV/V resistance and the link between this choice and the outcome) and four cases studies to this possibility. We find that, while it’s true that people consider the costs before acting, the information environments in which they are operating are highly uncertain and that the selection process isn’t really influencing a majority of the cases. Activists do not know when they go into the streets whether the regime is going to crack down indiscriminately or whether the regime will ignore them. And some of them disagree about which method is most effective, resulting in some people within the campaign choosing nonviolent resistance and others using violent resistance under identical circumstances. Indeed, we found no structural factors (including violent repression) that systematically influenced whether people resorted to nonviolent or violent resistance. In other words, it is not the case the the probability of success influences the choice to use nonviolent resistance.
I guess it’s up to the reader to decide whether these qualitative & statistical controls adequately address the selection effect.
Obvious-looking alternative to the interpretation I take it they have in mind: One of the factors that makes a campaign turn to violence is a sense that other means won’t get them what they want. Imagine a toy world in which there are causes with success probabilities ranging from 0 to 1, and ones whose success probability is <0.1 turn to violence, and doing so makes them 3x more likely to succeed. And imagine (toy world, remember) that these success probabilities are uniformly distributed. Then the typical nonviolent campaign succeeds 55% of the time, and the typical violent campaign only 15% of the time—but that doesn’t mean the violent campaigns should have stayed nonviolent to maximize their chances of success.
A good point to keep in mind, though it looks like Erica Chenoweth has tried to address it:
I guess it’s up to the reader to decide whether these qualitative & statistical controls adequately address the selection effect.
Ah, good. (I haven’t attempted to assess whether it’s addressed well, but it certainly looks like there’s a serious attempt.)