Nonviolent Resistance and Democratic Consolidation

The Research Council congratulates Mr. Dr. Daniel Lambach (Department of Political Science) for his success in soliciting third-party funds in the DFG research project "Nonviolent Resistance and Democratic Consolidation", which was supported in preparation for the application by the Main Research Area.

Nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes has received renewed public and academic interest in recent years. Several studies have confirmed that nonviolent strategies are efficacious in bringing about political change. However, the long-term impact of nonviolent resistance on the consolidation of democracy has not been studies thus far. This project aims to address this lacuna. We were able to show in a preliminary analysis that democracies which were installed after nonviolent resistance had a significantly higher rate of survival over time than other democracies. We wish to investigate the link between nonviolent resistance and democratic consolidation further by using a mixed-method research design.

On the quantitative side, we expand our preliminary study by analyzing whether the mode of resistance impacts not just the survival of democracy, but also its quality. We test this proposition using different measures of democratic consolidation and different methods, to also control for possible selection bias.

On the qualitative side, we, in collaboration with a team from the Berghof Foundation, will conduct six case studies of African and Latin American democracies to identify the causal mechanisms through which nonviolent resistance transmits its effects. From each region, we select three stable democracies, of which one each was installed after nonviolent resistance, violent resistance or without public resistance in order to compare the causal effects of different modes of resistance and transition. Data for the African cases will be collected during fieldfwork.

For the Latin American cases, we can draw on previously collected data of the Berghof Foundation so that these case studies can be conducted as desk research. In this way, the project will contribute towards a theory of resistance and political change. By controlling for potential selection bias, it also provides additional information about the situations under which resistance movements emerge. At the end of the project, we will integrate our results into the existing body of theory to provide a new summary of the "state of the art". In order to make our research relevant for practitioners, the Berghof Foundation will disseminate our results via their publication series, training materials and through two workshops in Berlin and Brussels.