Joining forces: Social coalitions and democratic revolutions
| Author | Sirianne Dahlum |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221138614 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Joining forces: Social coalitions
and democratic revolutions
Sirianne Dahlum
Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Abstract
When are mass protest movements able to overthrow authoritarian regimes and promote democratic transitions?
This article considers whether socially diverse protest movements are more conducive to democratization than
movements restricted to one or a few social groups. Coalitions across social groups should impose higher costs on
authoritarian regimes through access to a wide range of resources, strategies and sources of leverage. Heterogenous
protest coalitions are also more likely to socially overlap with regime supporters and the security forces, which should
encourage regime splits and defections. But, diverse protest movements may also be more vulnerable to fragmenta-
tion and in-fighting, which may particularly threaten prospects of democracy in the aftermath of an authoritarian
regime breakdown. Analyzing new global data mapping the social group composition of anti-regime protest cam-
paigns from 1900 to 2013, the article finds consistent evidence that socially diverse protest movements are more
likely to overthrow authoritarian regimes, and this is not driven by protest size. Socially diverse movements are also
more likely to end in the short- and long-run establishment of more democratic institutions, suggesting that
heterogenous protest movements’ potential for bringing about democracy is more promising than expected. These
findings speak to the importance of securing broad and not only large mass movements to promote democracy.
Keywords
democratization, mass protest, revolutions, social coalitions
Introduction
As part of the recent global protest wave of 2019, citizens
in countries such as Algeria, Hong Kong, Hungary,
Eswatini, Georgia, Iran and Sudan took to the streets
to demand (more) democratic governments. While all
these movements attracted large crowds and created local
and international headlines, only a few, including those
in Sudan and Algeria, produced any meaningful demo-
cratic improvements, and the Sudanese improvements
were later reversed in a 2021 military coup. Important
insights have been offered into why and when resistance
movements are able to promote democratization (and
related goals), pointing in particular to strategic choices
such as a reliance on nonviolent resistance strategies
(Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011), tactical diversity and
innovation (Cunningham, Dahl & Fruge, 2017), large-
scale mobilization (Chenoweth & Belgioioso, 2019) and
repression-contention dynamics (Sutton, Butcher &
Svensson, 2014). While this literature yields important
insights into the dynamics, strategies and contexts of
effective protest movements, it has paid less attention
to who the protesters are. Crucially, protest movements
vary considerably in terms of participants’ social back-
ground, and this should influence prospects for achieving
political change. In particular, while some protests have a
relatively homogenous social profile, mainly restricted to
certain segments of society, others build on broad coali-
tions across different social groups such as urban middle
classes, peasants and industrial workers. Could the
social diversity of protest movements explain prospects
of democratization?
Both historically and today, we see significant varia-
tion in resistance movements’ social diversity. To take
one historical example, while the 1932 anti-regime cam-
paign in El Salvador against authoritarian president
Corresponding author:
sirianne.dahlum@stv.uio.no
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(1) 42–57
ªThe Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221138614
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Martinez was largely restricted to peasants, the El Salva-
dorian ‘Strike of Fallen Arms’ campaign initiated
12 years later, which overthrew the government, was
a coalition movement spanning groups such as industrial
workers, public employees, peasants and urban middle
classes. Importantly, such social diversity is not just a
function of the number of participants in a protest, and
we see significant variation in protester diversity even
among very large movements. For instance, survey data
from the 2011 Arab Spring suggest that while the large-
scale Egyptian Arab Spring uprising was mainly confined
to the urban middle class including professionals, gov-
ernment employees and private sector employees, the
Tunisian Arab Spring movement was a broad-based
coalition between the urban middle class, workers, stu-
dents and the unemployed (Beissinger, Jamal & Mazur,
2015). Indeed, this has been pointed to as one reason
why the Egyptian revolution ended in a new dictator-
ship, while the Tunisian revolution induced a decade of
democratic improvements. Yet, the link between the
social diversity of protest coalitions and their outcomes
has yet to be studied systematically.
In considering the role of diverse social coalitions
in pro-democracy protests, the article builds on promi-
nent political science contributions highlighting the
importance of cross-class coalitions for transitions to
democracy.
1
Several influential case studies and small-
N comparative studies from the historical-sociological
literature emphasize the role of class coalitions in foster-
ing transitions to democracy (Moore, 1966; Luebbert,
1991; Lipset & Rokkan, 1967; Rokkan, 1999; Ruesche-
meyer, Stephens & Stephens, 1992). Also comparative
work on mass protests, such as Chenoweth & Stephan
(2011), suggests that movements are more effective
‘when participants reflect diverse members of society’.
However, the contemporary protest literature has not yet
accounted for differences in protest movements’ social
diversity, and expectations about the social basis of
successful pro-democracy movements have not yet been
investigated in a quantitative framework.
This article offers the first global study of the relation-
ship between protest movements’ social diversity and
democratic transitions. A protest movement can be
diverse in many ways, including goals, ideology, ethni-
city, organizational basis or gender, but this article con-
siders movements’ diversity in terms of social group
composition, defining a social group as a group of indi-
viduals with a common social and/or socio-economic
identity, that are likely to have some degree of connec-
tion through a shared social network.
2
The article dis-
cusses several mechanisms implying that a socially
diverse campaign, br inging together a broad range of
social groups, should be more effective than a movement
mainly consisting of protesters with a shared social back-
ground. For instance, diverse social coalitions should
impose higher disruption costs on antagonist regimes,
through the ability to use a broad range of strategies and
inflict costs across different sectors. Socially diverse pro-
tests should also have more vertical ties with members of
the ruling coalition, increasing the likelihood that
ongoing protest promotes defection by regime support-
ers. However, there are also potential mechanisms indi-
cating that class-coalitions may harm prospects of
democratization. Extant literature has emphasized unity
and coherence as important characteristics of successful
resistance campaigns, while showing that fractionalization
may lead to campaign deterioration. Highly heteroge-
neous movements may be ‘negative coalitions’, in the
sense that their members are united by their goal to over-
throw existing (authoritarian) institutions but lack a com-
mon goal for an alternative government (e.g. Goldstone,
2011). Such negative class coalitionsmay struggle to unite
around a new set of democratic institutions.
To evaluate the merits of these (somewhat) contrast-
ing expectations, this study analyses new global data on
the social group composition of all anti-regime protest
campaigns listed in the NAVCO 1.2 dataset (Chenoweth
& Stephan, 2011), covering 1900–2013. These data
map whether and to what extent a range of social groups
participated in each campaign: peasants; public sector
employees; military employees; religious or ethnic
groups; industrial workers; and urban middle classes.
Various tests of the relationship between protest move-
ments’ social diversity and democratization, at both
the protest campaign level and the country level, yield
1
The article follows Dahl’s (1 971) commonly used definitio n of
democracy as a system that is responsive to its citizens and realized
by contestation of political power (through free and fair elections), as
well as wide inclusion of citizens in the process of contestation (e.g.
through suffrage). While this understanding of democracy places
competitive elections (with inclusive suffrage) at the core, Dahl also
noted that a minimum of civil liberties such as freedom of expression
and association is necessary to ensure free and fair elections (Dahl,
1971). Viewing democracy as a continuous concept, I understand
democratization as improvements in the level of democracy,
occurring either gradually or more abruptly (e.g. through
democratic revolutions).
2
For insights on protest diversity in terms of gender, see Chenoweth
(2021).
Dahlum 43
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