3.5% rule

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.

Formulation

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan

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 revolutions 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 four times as many participants on average than 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", building on insights 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 hope to ever 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. Chenoweth has cautioned that the rule should be viewed as a "rule of thumb" rather than as a hard-and-fast law. Chenoweth has noted that nonviolent campaigns attract participation from larger numbers of people than do violent ones, in part because they have fewer requirements for physical ability or weapons, and that the larger numbers of people result in a greater likelihood of gaining political success. More recently, Chenoweth has noticed that both nonviolent and armed resistance have been decreasing in efficacy, concluding that this is the result of authoritarians learning from previous failures, coordinating with one another, and training their armies and police to discourage defections within their ranks. Consequently, Chenoweth has advised that civil resistance movements take these changes into account and alter their tactics accordingly.

Among the successful campaigns cited by Chenoweth as fitting with the 3.5% rule are the Cedar Revolution, the Singing Revolution, some of the 2012–2013 Egyptian protests, the Fall of communism in Albania, the 2019–2022 Sudanese protests, the Velvet Revolution, and the Rose Revolution.

Appraisals

Ron Pagnucco writes approvingly of the research underlying the rule, while also pointing out that "such large protests also may strengthen the hand of elite reformers in relation to hardliners in an authoritarian regimes", as opposed to simply contributing to declining support for the rulers. Kyle R. Matthews argues that Extinction Rebellion has misused the research, because "Chenoweth and Stephan's data relates to state-wide systemic change, mainly overthrowing autocratic governments, and does not apply to change in liberal democratic states." Richard Seifman, formerly of the World Bank, notes that nonviolent protests in Brunei and Bahrain attracted more than 3.5% of the population, but failed to achieve regime change. Chenoweth, however, has pointed out that Brunei and Bahrain were small monarchies whose ruling powers were able to benefit from powerful external allies like Britain and Saudi Arabia, respectively. Seifman also observes that coalition building and the use of social media are essential to a successful movement, while misinformation is likely to work against it.

In protests

The 3.5% rule has been cited as a goal by activists in the climate movement, who have argued that if this many people join the movement, change will follow. The Economist writes in an editorial that such a level of participation is currently very far from having been achieved.

In 2025, the 3.5% rule became prominent in protests against Donald Trump, including those concerning US immigration policy. Members of the 50501 movement organized the Hands Off protests of April 5, 2025, issuing a statement that said, in part: "April 5 was our fourth national day of action, and it won't be our last. We are committed to building our peaceful People's Movement and achieving 3.5% participation. History shows that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained peaceful resistance – transformative change is inevitable." A "back-of-the-envelope math" crowdsourcing effort to tally attendance at the June 2025 No Kings protests put total attendance "somewhere in the 4–6 million people range", or roughly 1.2–1.8% of the U.S. population.