Research suggests that nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns are more successful in deposing dictators than armed rebellions. However, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must learn to consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, indicating a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Building on the literature on modes of transitions and nonviolent resistance, we argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of NVR campaigns spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. We test the effect of NVR campaigns on democratic regime survival using survival analysis and propensity score matching. The results show that democratic regimes that experience NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without NVR.

Introduction Since the so-called Arab Spring, there has been a growing interest in the causes and consequences of nonviolent resistance (NVR) campaigns. These campaigns mainly involve unarmed people, using a combination of peaceful tactics such as strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations to achieve political goals. Resistance campaigns associated with the Arab Spring considerably differed with regard to their use of violence. Whereas the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Egypt Revolution are usually considered as predominantly nonviolent, the initially nonviolent protests in Libya and Syria soon evolved into armed rebellions, which led to thousands of deaths. In terms of successful transition to democracy, the record of these cases is mixed. Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya led to the ousting of long-term dictators, but at the time of writing, the Syrian uprising did not manage to depose the regime of Bashar al-Assad.1 Furthermore, ousting dictators is only the first step in the process of democratization. After deposing an autocratic regime, societies enter a transition phase where they must consolidate the gains of democracy and bargain about the new rules of the democratic regime. But even if free, fair, and competitive elections are held, which indicate a successful transition to democratic rule, uncertainty about its stability remains salient. In the period that follows, either democracy survives and proves to be resilient, or an autocratic backslide occurs. In this article, we build on the literature on modes of transitions (e.g. Munck & Leff, 1997) and on the literature on nonviolent resistance (e.g. Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011) to analyze the effect of NVR campaigns on the survival of democratic regimes. Whereas the former assumes that the characteristics of the transition process can have long-lasting effects on the stability of the resulting democracy, the latter argues specifically that the recourse to nonviolent means is superior in challenging autocratic regimes and increases the odds of democratic consolidation down the line. We argue that those democratic regimes that come into being as a result of a NVR campaign are less prone to democratic breakdown compared with democracies that were the result of violent resistance or those which were installed without any kind of resistance movement. The main mechanism which produces this effect is that the organizational culture of a NVR campaign spills over to the subsequent democratic regime fostering conditions favorable for democratic survival. Our article advances the literature on NVR and democratization in three ways. First, previous studies either analyzed how democracy changed after a resistance campaign occurred or looked at the outcome of different transition modes without considering how resistance campaigns influenced transitions to democracy. By contrast, our approach is based on a systematic data collection that links resistance campaigns to events of democratic transitions. Second, in contrast to previous studies that look at a snapshot of the level of democracy, we analyze the whole process of democratic survival. Third, we use multiple statistical methods (i.e. survival analysis and propensity score matching) to account for confounding factors and alternative measurement of key variables to ensure the robustness of our findings. The results of our empirical analysis indicate that democratic regimes that experienced NVR during the transition phase survive substantially longer than regimes without this characteristic. NVR during the transition process reduces the hazard of democratic breakdown by more than 50%. This research may inform the policy debate about whether it is useful for external actors to support resistance campaigns. As noted by Chenoweth, ‘The nature of the struggle [for democratic change] can often give us a good idea of what the country will be like after the new regime takes shape’ (Chenoweth, 2011). The rest of the article is organized as follows. In the second section, we review related literature on democratic consolidation and nonviolent resistance campaigns. We build on these previous studies to develop our own theoretical approach to the relationship between NVR campaigns and democratic survival, which we describe in the third section. In the following section we describe our research design for the empirical analysis. Results are presented, and then in the final section we discuss the findings of the empirical analysis and highlight areas for further research.

Discussion and conclusion In summary, the results of the empirical analysis support the hypothesis that democratic transitions that were induced by NVR campaigns are beneficial for the survival of democracy. The results of Cox models with panel data and time-varying covariates suggest that there is a substantial and statistically significant positive effect of NVR campaigns on the duration of democratic regimes. Similar results are obtained when using different samples of matched pairs, which were balanced for multiple potential confounding variables. Therefore, we conclude that there appears to be a systematic pattern in the survival of democratic regimes which relates to the presence or absence of NVR campaigns during the transition phase. Accordingly, our results support claims that the mode of transition influences the prospects of democratic consolidation, even in the long term. Or, in other words, there is something that we call a ‘democratic dividend of nonviolent resistance’. This also lends support to the notion of political transitions as critical junctures that lead to new, path-dependent trajectories in a country’s political development. NVR campaigns increase the odds of a political system not only transitioning to democracy but also of keeping this democracy alive for a longer period. These results have important practical implications for democracy promotion. External support for elite-led top-down transitions and support for violent groups to oust dictators appear to be ineffective strategies for long-term democratic consolidation. Sustainable democracy promotion requires support from a broad base of civil society actors, which demand and bolster democratic institutions and rights in a peaceful way. As always, some caveats are in order. First, some of our tests indicate the potential that the effect of NVR on democratic survival is diminishing over time. Thus, while our results generally show that NVR has a long-lasting positive effect on democratic survival, they are inconclusive regarding the question of how long exactly the effect lasts. Second, we only analyzed regimes which became democratic after 1955, thereby excluding long-term democracies that experienced their transition prior to that year (e.g. France and USA). Therefore, we do not know whether our results are affected by the omission of these long-lived democracies. Third, we have only measured the persistence of democracy, not its level of consolidation. We thus cannot interpret the results with regard to the question of whether democracies with NVR during the transition phase develop a higher quality of democracy than other democratic regimes. We understand these caveats mentioned above as directions for future research in order to substantiate our theoretical arguments further.

Replication data The data, code, and Online appendix are available at http://www.prio.org/jpr/datasets.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Cemal Öztürk, Lena Pohl, and Katrin Grätz for their outstanding research assistance and to Margit Bussmann, Véronique Dudouet, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Funding

Funding by the Priority Research Area ‘Transformation of Contemporary Societies’, University of Duisburg-Essen and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is gratefully acknowledged. Felix S. Bethke is grateful for support and funding from the Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Markus Bayer acknowledges funding from the Trajectories of Change Scholarship provided by the Zeit Stiftung.

Notes 1

For a more detailed description of these cases see Chenoweth & Stephan (2014) and Nepstad (2013). 2

Furthermore, among the 43 regimes Yugoslavia (Serbia) and Czechoslovakia experienced another form of censoring. These countries ceased to exist and therefore dropped from the sample although no democratic breakdown occurred. 3

More specifically, we considered campaigns where NAVCO coded the campaign goal as ‘regime change’, ‘significant institutional reform’, or ‘policy change’. Correspondingly, we did not consider campaigns where the goal was coded as ‘territorial secession’, ‘greater autonomy’, or ‘anti-occupation’. Furthermore, to ensure the validity of this coding, we inspected for each case if the form of resistance was violent or nonviolent and also checked whether there was indeed a causal link between the resistance campaign and the transition process. To this end, three coders independently evaluated each case using historical and case-specific information. This procedure identified six cases where either the campaign was not relevant for the transition process or the predominant method of resistance coded in the NAVCO dataset appeared questionable. These six cases entered a problem set, which was then evaluated by all authors in order to arrive at the final coding. See the Online appendix for further details. 4

To code this variable, we used the regime data from Ulfelder (2012) in combination with a geographic classification of world regions from Teorell et al. (2015). 5

All time-varying covariates are lagged one year to address problems of reverse causality. Summary statistics of all variables are described in the Online appendix. 6

The results of multiple tests indicate that the proportional hazard assumption is not violated for any of the covariates in Model 2 in Table II. We also tested the effect of NVR on democratic survival with a Cox model with shared country/regime frailties. The detailed results of these tests are reported in the Online appendix. 7

In the Online appendix we provide a detailed description of the matching procedures and summary statistics for the cross-sectional data. 8

Additional balancing statistics are described in the Online appendix. 9

In the Online appendix, we also report the results of Cox models for the three matched samples that also adjust for time-varying covariates measured after the transition. 10

Because we only match one treated case to one control case the estimated treatment effects reported in Table III should be considered as average treatment effect on the treated. This means the estimated effects only relate to the population of treated subjects and not to the whole population of cases. For all models reported in Table III, we tested the proportional hazard assumption. The results indicate that in the optimal sample the proportional hazard assumption is potentially violated, that is, the effect of NVR may be time-dependent. Accordingly, we re-estimated the model with NVR as time-dependent covariate. The results show that NVR significantly reduces the hazard of democratic breakdown but the effect may be diminishing over time. The detailed results are reported in the Online appendix. 11

The detailed results of all robustness tests are reported in the Online appendix.