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The 3.5% rule is a concept in political science that states that when 3.5% of the population of a country protest nonviolently against a government, that government is likely to fall from power. The rule was formulated by Erica Chenoweth in 2013. It arose out of insights originally published by political scientist Mark Lichbach in 1995 in his book The Rebel's Dilemma: Economics, Cognition, and Society.
Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied the success rates of civil resistance efforts from 1900 to 2006, focusing on the major violent and nonviolent efforts to bring about regime change during that time. To be classified as successful, a movement had to achieve its aims within one year of peak turnout, and had to satisfy strict criteria for nonviolence. By comparing the success rates of 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns, Stephan and Chenoweth demonstrated that only 26% of violent revolts were successful, whereas 53% of nonviolent campaigns were successful.
Of the 25 largest movements they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and they found that nonviolent movements attracted, on average, four times as many participants as violent movements did. They also demonstrated that nonviolent movements tended to precede the development of more democratic regimes than did violent movements.
Chenoweth coined a rule about the level of participation necessary for a movement to succeed, calling it the "3.5% rule", based on findings originally discussed by Mark Lichbach in 1995, in The Rebel's Dilemma: Economics, Cognition, and Society. Lichbach proposed that 5% of the population could topple a government, and that no opposition movement could ever hope to surpass that number due to the free-rider problem.
In 2013, Chenoweth revisited Lichbach's proposal using the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) 1.1 dataset. Chenoweth found that nearly every movement with active participation from at least 3.5% of the population succeeded. All of the campaigns that achieved that threshold were nonviolent.
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