The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

31 18 4 years ago

The Hong Kong protests were way over 3.5% with no change? 3.5% seems like an arbitrary threshold that's meant to be broken...

permo-w3• 4 years ago

as another commenter pointed out, it may well have been over 3.5% of the Hong Kong population, but it was by no means over 3.5% of the Chinese population

willmadden• 4 years ago

You just illustrated why this is a flimsy, social sciences, propaganda piece.

3.5% of what? There are international, national, provincial, and local authorities, each with different constituencies, all of which overlap to some degree.

The preferred method of coup by powerful external forces who finance them are color revolutions - usually via arming violent extremist groups with controlled opposition leaders. That’s about all I need to know.

d0mine• 4 years ago

By this logic, you would need more than 350 millions protesters to affect policy regarding climate change (global industry interests).

-- used 10B world population for simplicity.

djbebs• 4 years ago

It's frankly astounding to me how these people can fall for their own bullshit.

Really? No protest with over 3.5% of the population has ever failed? Really?

I can think of 2 of the top of my head, the Catalonia independence protests and referendum, and the Hong Kong protests.

In both cases there was a significantly higher portion than 3.5% actively protesting, and what was the result? I dont see an independent Hong Kong or Catalunya anywhere, do you?

The fact of the matter is that violence is the Supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.

A protest where non-violence is guaranteed from the outset is a losing proposition against any determined opponent, and when protesting about things that matter that opponent will always be determined.

I suppose that a better outcome for this study would be "in matters where the outcome has no significant impact on the decision makers, a 3.5% threshold is sufficient to enact a change in the status quo".

Congrats, you spent all that effort and resources to get the political equivalent of a paint job.

michael1999• 4 years ago

Hong Kong is a drop in the ocean of China, not even 1%. The numerator doesn’t get to choose the denominator.

I don’t have a sense for the Catalonian crisis. What fraction of the 7m Catalonians were active vs the 49m of Spain? I suspect not much more than 3-4%

hansvm• 4 years ago

That feels like a moving goalpost. When your >3.5% protest fails, just redefine the denominator to make it <=3.5%.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

If the model is that nonviolent protest is always effective if we cross a certain threshold, but that every citizen of Hong Kong could be in the streets without crossing that threshold, this model is meaningless.

Nonviolent protests are critical and can absolutely bring about change, but it is a brutal and drawn out process and not some kind of magic bullet.

Josteniok• 4 years ago

The article is from May 2019. Chenoweth has a paper published in April 2020 (see: https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files/CCDP_005...) where she hedges on the 3.5% rule. For example, one of her "key takeaways" at the top of the paper is:

New research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak. This suggests that there has been at least one exception to the 3.5% rule, and that the rule is a tendency, rather than a law.

skitout• 4 years ago

A lot of interesting things in this article and the work on what it is based.

Still, I think (that is a personal theory) one key element not mentioned here is what the protesters demand (how big will be the impact), and who will be impacted.

Recently, looks like more than 3.5% of the Lebanese population protested without any impact...But they were asking BIG changes, protesting against ALL the "elites" (and a big chuck of the bourgeoisie). Army leaders, politician around the spectrum, even some cleric had a lot to lose, and quite no one in a power position had anything to win.

In Tunisia or in Egypt, they were asking more freedom and a bit less nepotism (that is relatively cheap). Armies (and army leaders) had quite nothing to lose to support such big protests, and this "regime change" was an opportunity for a big chunk of the elite and of the "bourgeoisie" to "capture" more business and power.

I guess if 2.5 millions of French people would protest to end capitalism and make a big "equalization" of capital, their chances of achieving it by just protesting are 0. The stakes are too high, and all the element of the "power structure" would be totally against and ready to do a lot of think to preserve the status quo. Same protests regularly asking a 20% pay bump and more referendums like in Swissterland, would have serious chance to get something...

The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world

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