Everybody Get Together: Participation and Resistance Campaign Outcomes

• In Event: Protest and Resistance in the Developing World

Abstract

There is increasing interest in understanding the determinants of success in violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns. Successful resistance campaigns can lead to regime change, secession, and democratization. Yet the current literature has few systematic insights into the resistance campaign characteristics that are most likely to lead to success, beyond a recognition that campaigns that are large and nonviolent tend to succeed more frequently. In particular, resistance campaigns vary significantly in the organizations that participate in them. Yet we do not know what kinds of organizations tend to lead to resistance campaign success. In this paper we perform the first analysis of the organizational determinants of resistance campaign success, using a novel dataset compiling the organizations participating in maximalist resistance campaigns from 1990 to 2015 in Africa. We find that campaigns that enjoy the participation of organizations with significant connection to diverse social groups and enduring organizational infrastructures tend to succeed more frequently than resistance campaigns without these organizational participants. Our findings speak to the importance of disaggregating resistance campaigns based on their participating organizations.

Authors

• Jonathan Pinckney, Norwegian University of Technology and Science

• Charles Robert Butcher, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Jessica Maves Braithwaite, University of Arizona