Erica Chenoweth (5:50)

That's what shifts the balance of power. That's why 3.5% can do what it does. Because you don't. Movements don't necessarily need to get the majority of people over to their side. They just need to get everybody one tick closer to their side and that shifts the balance of power.

David McRaney (6:14)

My name is David McCraney. This is the you are not so smart podcast, and in this episode we are discussing the 3.5% rule. That is the name of a crucial threshold, a measurement, a number, an outcome discovered about a decade ago by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth. That's who you just heard. And Erica is our guest on this episode because the 3.5% rule has gone viral twice. Once a while back when Erica gave a TED Talk about it, and a second time right now at the time of this recording. Thanks to a surge in recent protests, Tens of thousands of people have marched

Erica Chenoweth (7:08)

in dozens of U.S. cities.

David McRaney (7:09)

Yes, marching, protesting, holding signs outside, shouting, chanting. And that first bit of audio that you just heard, that was in Canada. So it's all across the globe and people are discussing the 3.5% rule. It has returned to public discourse among people who are doing the organizing and doing the commenting upon those protests.

Erica Chenoweth (7:33)

Everybody's heard this 3 1/2% figure that's going around. My sister pointed me this morning to a very interesting study from Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth who discusses the 3.5% rule.

David McRaney (7:46)

Just 3.5% of the population need to

Erica Chenoweth (7:49)

buy in the 3.5% rule that often has been referenced, especially in the last couple months. There's something called the 3.5% protest rule.

David McRaney (7:57)

What's the magic number? Just 3.5%.

Erica Chenoweth (8:00)

The 3.5% rule is about this.

David McRaney (8:14)

What is the 3 1/2% rule or the 3.5% rule as some people call it? Erica Chenoweth calls it the three and a half percent rule. I'm going to try to stick to that and to make sense of it. Let's begin with the foundation, which is researching civil resistance. Working on a book about that topic, Maria J. Stefan and Erica Chenoweth discovered that for one thing, the success rate of nonviolent conflicts over the course of about the last 106 years was more than twice that of violent conflicts. Nonviolent conflicts are twice as successful as violent conflicts. It was a big surprise to both of them. They started the study skeptical of the power of nonviolent methods compared to violent ones. But yes, it was true. The evidence was clear. The numbers were right there. Over that time range. If you wanted to change your government, kick out a dictator, stop an occupation, get your politicians to listen to you, resist authoritarianism, change the laws, get your police to stop breaking those laws. The best strategy for the last 106 years has been not resorting to organized violence, not breaking stuff, not using guns, not lighting fires, not breaking out into riots, not becoming violent, not blowing up things, for sure. And definitely not shooting anyone, beating anyone or stabbing anyone. The more successful strategy, twice as successful, was organized non violence things like strikes, sit ins, boycotts, and showing up in person with signs, shouting and chanting and protesting. They studied 323 violent and non violent movements between 1900 and 2006, they considered a movement a success if it fully achieved its stated goals within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities, be they violent or nonviolent. And they found that violent campaigns succeeded 26% of the time, whereas nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time. And they found there were two main reasons for this. One, governments, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes. They can easily justify defending their whole thing when they're defending it against armed insurgents, when they're defending it against violent rebellions, or even just rioters, people lighting fires and breaking windows. It looks good for them on the news to see all of this stuff that they're protecting the populace against, protecting the state against. But violence by such a regime against peaceful protests full of people from all walks of life, that's a bad look overall. And it's more likely to backfire when it comes to public opinion. That then results in a breakdown of obedience within security forces, the judiciary, and among civil servants. It starts a cascade, a feedback loop. And the second thing is that a potentially sympathetic public often sees a violent movement as having all or nothing goals. It's hard to buy in with them because if you disagree just a little bit, it seems like you just disagree in total. However, with a nonviolent movement, it seems that that whole push, that protest, that organizing swell of something is happening. It seems to be amenable to concessions, to bargaining. People can buy in a little bit, they can get on board a little, little bit, and then a little, little bit more, and then a bit more, then a bit more, until eventually they are in. But here's the part that made all of this research go viral and then go viral a second time. Just 3.5% of the population need to buy in. Upon further inspection, Erica Chenoweth found that from 1900 to 2006, if the percentage of people showing up in person, physically showing up, marching, striking, refusing to cooperate, if that number reaches 3.5% of all the people in the nation, it never failed. In fact, many of the nonviolent movements that succeeded didn't get close to 3.5%. They reached their goals at 1% or 2%. But all the ones that reached 3.5% succeeded.

Erica Chenoweth (13:21)

No single campaigns failed during that time period after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population. And lots of them succeeded with far fewer than that. Now, 3.5% is nothing to sneak. In the US today, that's like 11 million people. But get this, every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5% was a nonviolent one. In fact, the nonviolent campaigns were on average, four times larger than the average violent campaigns.

David McRaney (13:55)

Not half the country, not a quarter of the country, not 10% of the country. Three and a half percent. But there are some caveats, which is why I wanted to talk to Erica Chenoweth, why I wanted Erica to be a guest on an episode of this podcast. And we're going to talk to Erica all about these caveats, which include the fact that this is not a magic number, it's a measurement. So you must do the things that result in that many people participating in your movement for the movement to succeed. In other words, you can't just organize 3.5% of the people in your nation to protest on the same day and expect that's all it's going to take for the opposition to throw up their hands or for a dictatorship to crumble. 3.5% is a measurement of an outcome that movements routinely reached over time. That level of participation, it must be sustained. And that leads us to the biggest caveat of them all, the people on the other side of protest movements today. The regimes across the world, the governments across the world opposing these protest movements, they know about the 3.5% rule and they have adapted to it. And the strategy opposition to these movements most often uses is factionalization. Through social media and agent provocateurs and all manner of psyops tactics, they provocate the people within the resistance to begin fighting among themselves. In political science terms, they elicit defection. They get protesters and revolutionaries to break up into warring factions camps who can't agree. Because even though 3.5% is a much smaller number than you might have assumed, it's still very difficult to get that many people to stay united, nonviolent, and committed to a common goal. And they count on that. But if you're up against the dictatorship or an authoritarian government, that factionalization strategy, it works in the other direction as well. Authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, fascist governments, they're also just groups of people attempting to stay organized. So fomenting division, creating factionalization, infighting, polarization, balkanization, and schismization is something nonviolent movements are actually pretty good at. And when such movements encourage defection, the people who defect become part of the growing percentage of the total public in the resistance. It's one of the main reasons such movements are more than twice as likely to succeed compared to those who resort to violence. It's difficult to justify your existence when the crowds that keep appearing remain unarmed, full of people of all ages and levels of physical ability, and demonstrate time and again that they are not a threat. When security forces imagine violence against such groups, it prompts disobedience and defection among the state's goon squads. And once they lose their goon squads, the strikes and sit ins and boycotts and rallies can grow so large that the crowds become daily mainstream national news. And that tends to generate the cascade that leads to people feeling safe to join in. And so goes the feedback loop that gets you up to 3.5%. As with anything involving human behavior, especially human behavior en masse, it's a bit more complicated than it seems at first glance. And we're going to get into all that complexity with the person who gave us this rule. Erica Chenoweth, right after this break. America's Best Network just got bigger.

Erica Chenoweth (18:05)

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David McRaney (18:07)

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David McRaney (18:32)

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David McRaney (19:05)

The School of Thought I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non profit organization. They provide free Creative Commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide and their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools K I T T E D Thinking Tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them and the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality, each one about double the size of a playing card. Matte Cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There are so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investors Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a user experience designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. You're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to kitted shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the school of thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world, on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. My name is David McCraney. This is the you are not so smart podcast and in this episode our guest is the discoverer and Namer of the 3 1/2% rule, Erica Chenoweth. Erica, yeah, first of all, who are you, what do you do, and how did you become interested in this to the point that this is probably something you'll do for a very long time and it takes up all of your free time?

Erica Chenoweth (22:38)

Yeah. So I am a political scientist. I happen to work at Harvard University, but of course, I'm here in my individual capacity. And here at Harvard, I have something that I direct called the Nonviolent Action Lab. And what we do is we collect data and do analyses about basically where and how movements around the world and in the United States are winning or being defeated and why that's happening. We try to produce timely analysis in a way that is informative for people trying to understand this stuff. The talk that I gave that was about the 3.5% rule was a TEDx Boulder talk that I gave in 2013. And the backstory behind how that came about is that my colleague Maria Steffan and I had together collaborated on a study that resulted in a book. And the study was the first to systematically compare the outcomes of armed and unarmed mass resistance movements in the 20th and into the beginning of the 21st century. What we were trying to do is understand whether there was a significant difference in the outcomes of armed and unarmed mass movements that were against dictatorships or for territorial independence. And we found that the nonviolent campaigns were, like, twice as likely to succeed from 1900 to 2006 as the violent ones, and that they were more likely to lead to democratic transitions than armed campaigns. So we published a book in 2011 called why Civil Resistance Works. And over the course of the next couple of years, there were a lot of movements happening in the US There was Occupy. There was the Arab Spring in the spring and summer before Occupy even. And so there was a lot of interest in not just the finding that armed resistance movements were less likely to succeed than unarmed ones. And that seemed to be playing out pretty clearly, at least at that time in the Arab Spring cases, but also in the theory for why that was the case and the analysis we did about the difference between successful and failed nonviolent movements. And one of the big theories is just that nonviolent movements are much better at getting very large numbers of people to participate from all walks of life than our armed movements. And that large participation is what elicits those defections, especially from security forces, in key moments of the peak of the movement, basically. And so what happened is that I was at a workshop with some activists, and one of the activists asked me if there was a critical threshold, a critical mass. And I said, I don't actually know that. I'm sure that it's just like more people are better. But there is a guy named Mark Lickbach who's a political scientist and he published a book called the Rebels Dilemma. And in it there's a note that he makes where he basically speculates that something like 5% of the population revolting against the government would be sufficient to make it impossible for the government to survive. And so it's called sort of the 5% rule. And I actually can look at our data and tell you if that tracks. And so I opened the data set and I was like, oh, actually I see here that none of the movements in our data set that surpassed 3.5% of the population failed. So maybe it's because Mark Lickbach had already kind of made that speculation and then the number was around that ballpark, but a little lower. I thought that was an interesting source of sort of validating it. And so the talk that I gave and TedX Boulder was sort of making clear that that was what was true in our data set. And it went from there.

David McRaney (26:23)

I guess you know this, but the 3.5% rule is very memed up to the point that I told friends and family that I was going to talk to you and who don't follow any of this stuff aren't nerds about it in any which way, shape or form. And they were like. And they knew what I was talking about.

Erica Chenoweth (26:40)

Wow.

David McRaney (26:41)

And the reason that I was like, oh, I wonder if I could actually talk to them about this was I started seeing it pop up on Tick Tock and reels and YouTube shorts. I saw a, a newfound optimism forming from a, from a lot of people who were like, what is the point? Like, what, what can one person do? And I was, oh, well, is that a thing for real? Because I've heard about it and my immediate like, you know, skepticism is like, I don't know. And I started looking at all your stuff and I was like, wow, there's like research and all these cool things. It's not just like a TED Talk that went viral. And I was like, I would love to talk to you about it. So are you aware of the massive new. Like this, this new burst of virality?

Erica Chenoweth (27:24)

Yeah, I mean, it is popping up in unusual places, including places that I am not. Right. So I'm not on TikTok, not on really any social media anymore, except for Blue sky. And it pops up there too. And so I'm pretty aware of it. Even in the last, I think on the April 19th kind of day of protests that took place, at least one news outlet said that the organizers were explicitly aiming for 3 and a half percent of the population to participate in that day. And they didn't make reference to the rule, but they, they made reference to like the number of people, 11 to 12 million people is their goal, is what they. And so I think that it is making its way around for sure.

David McRaney (28:09)

How does that make you feel?

Erica Chenoweth (28:12)

Well, so I'll say that I understand why people are drawn to looks like a magic number. It looks like a number that provides people with certainty and guarantee. And it's also a surprisingly modest number. And I think that the way that people receive it and experience it is that, wow, that's a smaller number than I would have guessed as being a critical threshold for toppling or pushing back on an authoritarian regime or an attempted democratic backsliding episode or things like that. So that's a smaller number than I expected, a totally doable number. And that gives people a sense of empowerment and you know, kind of metric to aim for. So I totally understand why people receive it that way. I also think that there are no shortcuts. The 3.5% rule is kind of a rule of thumb. It's not a guarantee for movements going forward for a number of reasons. One is that it's a descriptive number that is assigned to a historical database where people weren't self consciously trying to organize 3 1/2% of the population, right? They were trying to organize as many people as they possibly could. But they'd also been building organizations and organizing people for sometimes years before some mass mobilization episode. And that mass mobilization built over time, it built pressure over time. It induced defections from the opponents pillars of support and that's why they won. So it's not so much that three and a half percent of the people just woke up one morning, decided to go and protest and their dictatorship fell. That's not how it played out at all. And actually we don't know what happens in the future for two reasons. One is just the sort of reality of if people are trying to organize and aim for that number, we don't know what happens when people are sort of self consciously aiming for it. But the other thing that's happened is, you know that the talk that I gave that first established, I guess the figure, the 3.5% rule I gave in 2013. And since then there have been a lot of movements and a lot of governments that seem to have figured out how to either ignore them or subdue them, even when they've gotten pretty impressive numbers. And so I think there's been a lot of learning on that side too. And so we are in a little uncharted territory. So my next book is about that. It's about effectively authoritarian learning about the fact that nonviolent resistance is a real thing and is threatening to authoritarian regimes. And they have figured out ways effectively to prevent defections among security forces in a way that they didn't really know to do in the face of mass protest 20, 30, 40 years ago.

David McRaney (31:15)

I didn't expect you to make me sad so quickly.

Erica Chenoweth (31:18)

Well, so let me share some good news. Okay, so I'll first start by saying what you said about the sort of divide and rule aspect of this is really important. Divide and rule is kind of one of the overarching kind of strategic frameworks for maintaining power in authoritarian regimes. But it's also useful as a way of understanding how movements win against them. Because movements win by dividing the regime, right? So they. It's divide and rule in both directions. Movements win by eliciting defections. Defections are when, you know, people who are economic or business elites or state media or civil servants who previously were loyal and then aren't so sure anymore because they think everything is crazy and unstable and it's not good for them. You know, people who are kind of on, on the day to day required to be loyal in order for the, for the government to maintain its hold on power. When those people begin to stop cooperating is when, you know, movements have their breakthrough moments. So if you think about the anti apartheid movement in South Africa, for example, the way that they won was by effectively compelling the economic and business community to urge the National Party, which was the pro apartheid party, to elevate a reformer who was intent on doing business with the ANC and was going to unban them and negotiate with them and find a resolution to this standoff. And it was the pressure that was built by people power movement that was largely organized out of black townships and imposed boycotts on white owned businesses, but also the general strike and used kind of labor and the social power that derived from it to put this massive economic pressure on the business class. And then there was also external pressure in that case that really squeezed the economy and they basically shifted their, their orientation entirely like this. This has to change. We have to have a democracy here. There's no other way out. And so what's important there is just knowing that like the numbers really do matter, right? But they matter because they provide the capacity to build that kind of pressure. That's part of why what I see going on in the United States right now is very interesting, both because it is a lot of protest and in some cases very large protests and large days of protests. My team at the crowd counting Consortium has tallied what we think is something like three times more protests this year between January 22nd and the end of March than we saw during the same time period in 2017. So there's way more mobilization happening and in some cases very big days of protests, like the April 5th protests, which were. That was a massive showing. So that's happening. But so is the development of innovative techniques like economic non cooperation. So this is where people are outside of Tesla showrooms. They are selling back their Teslas. They are not buying from retailers that they think are too closely aligned with the administration. And those things are taking a toll. Like there's direct material impacts on those businesses and those who are interested in. And those businesses aren't even monolithic. Right. So every corporation has, you know, the people in the C suite, but it's also got the workers, it's got the ad folks, it's got the distributors, it's got the consumers, it's got the shareholders. All of those are not monolithic. They're just like the government where people have different loyalties. They're kind of in it for their own interests and they can shift as well. So like, those are all ways that movements shift people kind of one notch over in their loyalty. And that's what shifts the balance of power. That's why 3.5% can do what it does. Because movements don't necessarily need to get the majority of people over to their side. They just need to get everybody one tick closer to their side and that shifts the balance of power.

David McRaney (35:39)

Tell me where I'm wrong here. It feels like some of what you're saying is it's not about getting to this magical number. It's that this magical number is the number that you see as the result of all the other stuff that's happening. Yeah, all these things, all these people working together and all these things organizing and this not being too factionalized, doing what you're doing results in about this number of people that's it's not, it's going in this direction, not the other direction is what I'm trying to say. Like this number is a measurement of something. It is not the number you're trying to get to, to make a magical thing happen.

Erica Chenoweth (36:20)

Yeah, exactly. So I'd call it an indicator or like a descriptive figure as opposed to a prescriptive figure.

David McRaney (36:26)

Okay.

Erica Chenoweth (36:27)

If we think about that hypothetical scenario where it's like, okay, certain number of million people go to the streets for a couple of weeks in a row. If you play out what that hypothetical looks like in reality, it's that if you, if there's like no preparation, no, you know, preparation for repression, for example, no discussion about nonviolent discipline, no discussion about the importance of uniting behind some kind of common aim, then it's a lot of people exposing themselves to risk, potential for infiltration, potential for real harm, encirclement, repression from the outside, provocations from the inside. And there's also, you know, there can be a phenomenon where it doesn't exactly meet the public where they're at either. So the most powerful movements are ones that invite the public into a conversation as opposed to the ones that are like genuine nuisances to the public. Right, or perceived as nuisances. I mean, movements that trend that are very transgressive are going to come across as a nuisance at times, that's for sure. But they also shift their methods of resistance so that some of them are more inclusive and inviting to people that begin to really, you know, create those little shifts that I was talking about. So it's not all just going to the streets all the time. It's also innovating these techniques that are basically winning the movement more and more friends over time and fewer, fewer enemies.

David McRaney (38:02)

Okay, well, the discipline thing, that makes sense to me. Your movement has to have discipline. You have to be prepared. You have to know what to expect, stay organized, stay unified, stay on task, stay together. The not frustrating people thing, that's a bit surprising to me because I'd always assumed one of the powers of a nonviolent movement with like boycotts and sit ins and strikes, is that you're gumming up the works in a way that makes you undeniable, unignorable. Where am I wrong here?

Erica Chenoweth (38:36)

If, if it was a 3 1/2% of the population in most countries, that's a really large proportion, right? So most countries are not literally built to create public spaces for that many people to assemble. Right? So it's visually striking. In many cases, it would basically bring a country to an orderly standstill that could have direct material impacts. Right, that really could. And there are different ways to elicit defections. One of them is through kind of coercion or making life inconvenient for someone. And then they just calculate that, you know, if they stop doing what they're doing, their life is going to get better and so they're going to stop doing what they're doing. Not necessarily join the movement, but Just not go along with this thing they're told to do, to suppress the movement, for example. Like maybe they're not going to do that. And so that would be like a defection there. And that's more of kind of maybe a disruptive or sort of coercive way of doing it. But there are other ways of eliciting defections, sometimes more effective in the long term for creating a really durable coalition. And that's things like persuasion, right, and kind of negotiation and dealing with people in a non public way in order to encourage them to change the way they're thinking about a situation or something. And there's sort of different roles for different methods and there are different roles for different people. And all of those are usually going on to some degree in movements that succeed. So it's not wrong that sometimes disruption inconveniences people so that they give up what they're doing. But it's not the only way that it happens. And it's usually not a sufficient mechanism for creating the type of coalition that most movements end up wanting to have.

David McRaney (40:23)

After you did the research, after you had like all of it kind of laid out in front of you and you had the data and the evidence, what was the most surprising thing about it to you or were you surprised at all?

Erica Chenoweth (40:34)

I was surprised. I was surprised at the starkness of the difference. And, and I'll just tell you that going into the, the research, there had been a pretty important article published by a guy named Max Abrams called why Terrorism Does Not Work. And in it he makes the argument that, that if you count up all of the different terrorist groups that were then on the sort of official lists and whatnot, and you look at how many of them actually achieve their goals, it was something like 7% of them. And he said that's a very low success rate for coercive effectiveness. I mean, if you compare it against state armies or any other kind of violent formation, like that's, that's a very low success rate. And, and then on the last page of his article, he says this raises questions about why terrorism happens at all if it's so ineffective. And he said that maybe Even at just 7% success, it's more effective than other forms of like nonviolent protests. So that was like what the general field thought of the possibility of nonviolent protests, I think, going into this study. So when I found, when, when, when the findings were that it was twice as likely to have succeeded as organized armed resistance, that was very surprising to me. And then the Other piece that that was really an aha about it was because of the mass participation angle and the way that nonviolent methods of resistance are just so much more inclusive than methods of armed resistance. For lots of reasons, we were able to sort of theorize that for the first time. And that theory is, I think, part of what has really clicked for a lot of people. And it tracks not just to the types of maximalist campaigns or revolutions that we were studying. It tracks to all kinds of different types of movements. And people seem to really resonate with this idea that unarmed people using methods that don't hurt or threaten to hurt other people are what invites the public into a conversation. And that as soon as the methods try to threaten to hurt people or do hurt people, the public shuns them. And that plays out in survey experimental data. It plays out in all kinds of new studies that people have done kind of testing those types of arguments out. And obviously there's some boundary conditions and things like that, but the general sentiment is that that dynamic is pretty general around the world. It's just really important and understanding things like why movements need to build capacities for nonviolent discipline and training and preparation, organizing so that they can maintain nonviolent resistance even when their opponent is escalating against them.

David McRaney (43:19)

You are still doing a battle, but you're out thinking the opponent way ahead of time. Like, you're out predicting, you're out modeling. Here's an important fact checking question. No movement that's reached that 3.5% threshold has failed. Is that a true statement?

Erica Chenoweth (43:37)

It was true with the data that ended in 2017, six data that end in 2014. There's an exception, and that is the Bahrain Arab Spring movement, which we think achieved above the 3 and a half percent threshold and did not win. There's also an armed movement, I think it's in brunei in the 60s that it turns out probably achieved that threshold and didn't win in the short term, but won like a year later. So there are some exceptions, but they're both pretty specific. They're both small island or kind of small monarchies that had like major international backing and so are kind of a very particular case. But yes, the general finding is that at least through the data that we have fully updated in 2014, there was only one exception of a nonviolent resistance movement that failed after that. After meeting that threshold and then with the updated data through 2021, I'm still working on it, so I don't know. But at least through 2014. Yes, one of the things that's true too, and maybe is important to say is that a lot of movements win without getting three and a half percent. Most movements that win didn't get close to that threshold. And so Zoe Marks and I did a study a couple of years ago with a guy named Andrew Hawking, where what we did was we tried to run through kind of computational methods three different types of strategies. One is the strategy of just get as many people in the streets as soon as you can and hope for the best. The second strategy is a pillar strategy where there's a concerted effort to move protest in a way that would influence pillars in the society. So trying to get the defections. And then the third strategy is a pillar strategy, but it's enhanced by information, which means that the movement knows in advance which of the pillars is already the least loyal, and they go there first and they work on them to try to create a cascade of defections. And what we found is that that third strategy is by far the most likely to succeed, even with very small numbers. And the get as many people to the streets as fast as possible and hope for the best strategy is the least likely to succeed, even with because it's just hard to get to the critical thresholds. And so if there's no strategy for inducing defections, huge numbers of people in the streets as fast as possible, especially when you're facing a repressive opponent, just doesn't always work. Right. It just doesn't always work out to get as many people as a movement would want. And so that, again, directs our attention to this issue of the reason why the numbers matter is because of how they change the balance of power among the pillars. Not necessarily just because they reach kind of a critical threshold that then manifests some kind of change in the public mood or something.

David McRaney (46:42)

How did you get interested in this as a career thing? I understand that. I've read about what little is available about this. I know you were interested in terrorism and, you know, how change at the end of a barrel of a gun, that sort of thing. But before all that, like, how does young Erica decide? This is what I'm interested in. How did you become interested in political science as a thing you wanted to go become a super expert in?

Erica Chenoweth (47:09)

It's something that I've just wanted to do as long as I was thinking about what I wanted to do in the world. You know, I was born in 1980, so 1989 and 1990, when the East European revolutions were happening. I remember my, you know, my middle elementary school teachers talking about it. You know, we watched when I took my first German class in middle school, my German teacher, I think the first week of class or something like that, wheeled a TV in and showed us the footage again of the Berlin Wall coming down. I mean, it was like a really important, formative moment in world politics and in my own kind of political consciousness as a child. And then the wars in Yugoslavia were very affecting for me. There was a girl named Zlata Filipowicz who wrote a diary called Zlata's Diary. She was a Bosnian Serb girl living in the siege of Sarajevo, and we are exactly the same age. And British journalists had discovered her diary and figured out a way to get it published. She was sometimes called the Anne Frank of Sarajevo because it was a child's kind of narration of the devastation of the siege. And my mom got it for me, and I read it, and I just could not understand how people could not figure out how not to kill each other in this conflict. And then, interestingly enough, Bill Clinton thought it wise to have the peace talks for that conflict in Dayton, Ohio, at Wright Pat Air Force Base. And so it was on the. It was like the COVID story of the Dayton Daily News that the Dayton Peace Accords were underway during my early teen years. And so I paid very close attention to it and with a sort of overall orientation to trying to figure out how people could prevent this type of armed conflict from breaking out elsewhere and how they could bring it to an end where it was already active. And then it was interesting. I grew up in the summers living in Santa Fe because my dad played in the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and my mom sometimes played there, too. And so our family would live in this development of Santa Fe that had used to be federal property. And we didn't know much more about it, but my brother and I used to dig holes in the sand and during the. During the day, just to pass the time. And we found some pottery, and we had a beautiful garden. And we found this pottery that was pretty deep down and took it to the Santa Fe Public Library, which is where you found out information back the librarian. And she explained to us that our development had actually been one of the internment camps during World War II, and that the pottery was probably from a Japanese family. And so were probably a lot of the things in the garden. And so I learned about that history, and I learned about. I was very into World War I. I wrote my own, like, historical fiction novel about World War I. Like, I was just, like, very consumed by Preventing big wars from happening and destroying people's lives like that. That was like my orientation from, as I mentioned, being a very young child. So when I went to college and I pursued courses of study that I thought would make. Make me a good fit for either a diplomatic career or, you know, academic career, I wasn't really sure that I was going to be an academic, but I was open to it. But I really thought I would, you know, probably be some kind of diplomat. And then my senior year in College was when 911 happened in the fall. And so when I was writing my grad school applications, I really wrote about wanting to better understand global terrorism and its patterns and its impacts. And that kind of oriented my doctoral research. When I got into a PhD program, I just committed to study that. And my dissertation was actually about why terrorism was so common in democratic countries where there so many other ways to express one's political opinions. It was a response to the Bush doctrine, which presumed, I thought, probably wrongly, that by spreading democracy around the world, even if it was in a coerced way, militarized spread of democracy, was somehow going to eradicate terrorism. And I just didn't think there was any empirical support to suggest that that was going to be the outcome. So I undertook that research and built on some other existing research that was bubbling up at the time in my field about that and wrote my thesis about it. And it was just right, right at the end of my doctoral study that I attended a workshop where I met Maria Stefan and was introduced to the literature on nonviolent resistance. And I literally never encountered any of the readings or the questions they were asking or the assertions they were making through my whole PhD and found it very intriguing, but also wanted a bit more, wanted to understand more systematically whether some of the kind of theory and cases of nonviolent resistance that people raised were actually part of a broader pattern, or whether they were exceptions to a general rule that like, violence happens because people think it works, right? Which was like my overriding assumption. Doing that research with Maria was very important because my skepticism about nonviolent resistance was incorrect. Being surprised by finding like that does change, you know, what one is curious about and wants to pursue. And so I did spend a good number of years in my career, like, developing a pretty significant portfolio of studying terrorism and counterterrorism and armed insurgency and state repression. And like, I'm still very on that track to some degree, but I also have this very significant portfolio of work that's better trying to understand where, why, and how nonviolent resistance is a realistic alternative.

David McRaney (53:13)

First, I love the idea that the fall of Berlin Wall, the ripples out from it hit you and it can like this, this conversation we're having and everyone who's going to hear this and everything else that you're doing is a further, you know, manifestation of all the things that took place as that wall came down. That is amazing to me. Stuff like that does change the world. Yeah, that's killer. Also, you are one of the strangest nerd child nerds I've ever heard before. I have the first. I've never heard of a child that was really into World War I, not during our generation. I wasn't born in 77, so. But similarly, I. I saw the Challenger explode live.

Erica Chenoweth (54:01)

Yep, me too.

David McRaney (54:02)

And that led to. That's. That's what got me basically like that. I made a memorial for the Challenger as a. As a little kid, and they put it up on the wall and it was there for like eight years. And that started my whole thing. Wow. So going, going to visit NASA was like. It was like an arc completion for me. But. So I feel this about you. Like, you having that foundation leads to you being a better researcher on this topic. And so now you will give better advice on this topic because you've got that understanding of the thing that maybe a person who started here wouldn't even be looking at. They would need to go to a workshop about terrorism and violent change for them to get the full circle. So I do want to know what made you go to that workshop.

Erica Chenoweth (54:49)

So a colleague of mine who is something of a mentor in the terrorism studies field named Victor Assal, forwarded me an email that he got from announcing the workshop. He forwarded it to me and said, here's the other side of the coin. And I had gone. I'd met Victor because I'd gone to a teaching workshop about how to teach about terrorism and counterterrorism. Because that was sort of like a. There weren't very many college courses about it. And I was a doctoral student hoping to go on the academic job market and be a credible person who could come into a new department and teach this subject. Well, because it's, you know, like a lot of subjects in political science, very contested and can raise a lot of interesting kind of ethical questions in the. In the course of teaching it. So. So I'd gone to this teaching workshop and I'd met Victoria. And so he thought, oh, you like that teaching workshop? Here's another one. But it's on a different topic. And so this one was called People Power and Pedagogy. And it was about trying to get young early career professionals to be able to write a syllabus and teach a course about nonviolent resistance. And I was mostly interested in it, I'd say, from the professional development angle, but it was also like networking a new group of people. Free books. I'm a sucker for free books. And so still. And so I think that together is what motivated. And it was also very convenient. I was finishing my PhD at University of Colorado, which is in Boulder, and this workshop was at Colorado College down the road. And so I applied and got in. You had to apply. And so when I got in, it was like, okay, this is another professional development opportunity. But I didn't think anything more than that. And when I was reading the books that they sent in preparation for it, that's when I was like, developing some skepticism about the content that I was looking forward to discussing with people there. And Maria Steffen had recently finished her PhD at the Fletcher School, and she'd written her thesis entirely about the topic. In particular, the question of what happens when there's a secessionist movement that is trying to use nonviolent resistance, but it's a small, territorially kind of marginalized group, and how they actually get the power in order to bring about the power shift. And so she'd written her thesis on what she called extending the nonviolent battlefield. So getting third party actors from outside the country to support the movement, like in East Timor or South Africa. So very interesting. South Africa was in a secessionist movement, which is one in which they extended the nonviolent battlefield by bringing in external pressure. She was already a total expert in the field, and for that reason and many others, was a wonderful person for me to have to sort of raise the questions that I had about what had been done in the field. Like, had anybody done the study where they lined up side by side, comparable campaigns of armed and unarmed resistance over the course of history and figured out which one was more likely to have won? And she was sort of like, I don't think so.

David McRaney (57:50)

What do you think that is? What do you think that this is such a. Before you got started, why is this such an underrepresented line of research in this field?

Erica Chenoweth (58:00)

Well, you know, in sociology, there's a very large. There's a very large orientation toward data collection on protest and things like that. But they just. There hadn't been that much systematic look into, like, quantitative scholarship on whether unarmed or armed protest was more likely to succeed. They just mostly focus on protest and didn't focus on the manner of it, for example. But there's a very large literature in sociology that could have done that. And then since then has done that. Right. It has started to look more at tactical choice and the impacts of that. And then the field of nonviolent conflict itself had a really interesting kind of origin and had been for a while quite theoretical, building on the work of Gene Sharp especially, who published a really important kind of foundational treatise in the early 70s about it. And then a lot of other scholars had done case studies on nonviolent conflict. And then still others had sort of done comparative case studies to try to understand cases of success and failure, but less so direct comparisons with armed conflict. In my field, in political science, there's a ton of research on armed conflict. Like if my field has, like for decades, have datasets called the correlates of war data and things like that, where we look a lot at fatalities and who wins and who loses and all that kind of stuff. There just was no comparable database for mass nonviolent movements. And I thought what we need is like a correlates of war data set, but for people power movements, so that we can actually do those types of assessments.

David McRaney (59:38)

What do you say to a person given all this stuff? Like, I consider you like the person to ask this question. I'm just one person. What can I do? So what would you say to a person who's feeling that and maybe even saying that or sharing that on social media? I'm just one person. What can I do?

Erica Chenoweth (59:55)

Yeah, one thing to do is just not forget how much power and agency you have. I mean, one person with it has a lot of agency, and there are always choices to make. And that's true no matter what's going on. And then the second piece is to try to do things together with others, because we do know that what people do really matters and what movements do really matters in kind of shaping the future direction of a country. And it's because of collective action, not necessarily because of what one person does, but because that one person brings their agency, their creativity, their sphere of influence, their ideas, to a broader conversation and joins in a common effort with others. And all of the moments of progress that we've had in our country is because people did that. They sort of looked at what was going on around them and they made a decision to join in with others, to try to improve the situation. And so just don't forget that that's how it works. And that every one of us really does have such an important role to play and what transpires in the future.

David McRaney (60:56)

I also want you to know that you are doing that every time you go out and give an interview and share and re help clarify what you're talking about. You're one of the engines of positive change in my opinion. And I just want to thank you, like explicitly thank you for carrying through on the mission that you put yourself on as a young person going into this world.

Erica Chenoweth (61:19)

So thank you so much, David. I really appreciate it.

David McRaney (61:28)

Ham. That is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to you you are not so smart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. In those show notes you will find links to Erica Chenoweth's book and research paper where the 3.5% rule first appeared. You'll also find a link to their TED Talk Q and A about the rule and more. You can find my book How Minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are@davidmcraney.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Right there in your podcast player. On my homepage davidmcraney.com you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things for all the past episodes of this podcast. Go to SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or you are not so smart.com youm can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue sky and everything else that's like that avidmcraney symbol. David McCraney Follow the show Blog. We're also on Facebook. You are not so Smart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me. Go to patreon.com you are not so Smart. Pitching in at any amount gets you the show ad free. But the higher amounts that'll get you posters and t shirts and signed books and other stuff. The opening music that is Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really really want to support this show, the best way to do that? Just tell people about it. Either rate and comment on it on all these platforms or just tell somebody directly, hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something that really connected with you and check back in in about two weeks for a fresh new episode.

Erica Chenoweth (65:02)

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