Watch Your Back! Identifying Overturners of Civil Resistance Transitions
Abstract
Who overturns nonviolent revolutions? Successful nonviolent revolutions tend to lead to democratization. However, in several prominent cases, activists for democracy during civil resistance campaigns overturn democratic transitions and initiate returns to autocracy. No research to date has systematically examined the pathway from organizations participating in civil resistance to overturning democratic transitions across cases. In this paper we present and analyze a novel dataset of civil resistance successor organizations to address this question. We find that the most significant predictor of overturning is an index of organizational capacity. Former activists overturn democracy when they are embedded in hierarchical organizations, have significant mobilizational capacity, and have institutional positions of power during transitional regimes. Anti-democratic ideologies are poor predictors of overturning behavior, and ties to the old regime lose significance as predictors of overturning when accounting for capacity.