Civil resistance and the 3.5% rule

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.

Please post an introductory paragraph explaining what this is about and why you are posting your scattered links?

It seems kind of common sense that a small group of people using violence against a very large, well-armed group are going to have a tough time.

It feels like reading something like this may have mislead the Syrian rebels. Nonviolent resistance runs the risk that the other side presses the violence button.

This describes the case where there's an establishment and a resistance. What happens when there's two establishments and two resistances, each opposing the other? I think this is the more relevant scenario for your interest.

The issue, as I understand gjm, is whether there's a confounding factor.

Treating the correlation between choosing nonviolence (call that N for short) and succeeding in a political campaign (call that S) as accurately representing causality works if one assumes causation runs exclusively as N → S. gjm observes that expected probability of success (P) could be a confounding factor: maybe we have the extra causal arrows N ← P → S, as well as N → S.

According to her blog comment, Chenoweth did try to tackle this by establishing that there's no N ← P causal arrow. Reconstructing her apparent logic, she says she found that external structural factors (X), which activists presumably use to form their beliefs about the probability of success, are uncorrelated with the decision to use nonviolence: i.e., she supposes that X → P and observes that X is uncorrelated with N, so P → N is implausible (because otherwise we'd have X → P → N and X would correlate with N, assuming, uhhh, the causal Markov condition I think?). If we accept that argument, then P isn't a confounder.

Chenoweth also implies that she compared the outcomes within campaigns which split into a nonviolent arm and a violent arm. That would arguably control for P, if one accepted that for any given campaign which splits into two, P is the same for the two new subcampaigns. I don't think I do accept that, but I could be wrong, and if so this alternative analytical approach would address the issue.

It's hard for me to come to a strong final conclusion because I haven't read the book. Based on the blog comment, I wouldn't trust that Chenoweth's isolated the potential confounder, but I might change my mind if I read the book. Along similar lines, you could well be correct about what's typical for campaigns, but I can't conclusively say you are because I haven't systematically studied a wide range of political campaigns from this perspective.

A misnamed idea which assumes there are effectively no costs to accommodating the minority.

This depends heavily on how one defines campaigns. Is the NAACP of 1910 the same campaign as Malcolm X in 1960?

I suspect that each group would say no, but their common opponents would say yes.