Erica Chenoweth

none of these models have predictive power, right?

So lots of things can be different, but I think the, yes, if what we saw in 2017 and 2018 tracks in this case, then we would expect in a normal kind of election year and under normal circumstances to see a similar outcome in the 2026 midterm.

Yeah, so the 3.5% statistic is based on a historical observation of 323 mass movements between 1900 and 2006.

And it came from a conversation I was having with...

with an activist, actually, who asked me if there was some kind of critical threshold above which no movements had failed in terms of mass participation.

And so this was after a study that Maria Stephan and I did.

Our book had come out, and I was doing some workshops and

and talks about it.

And so, like, just looked at the data and then found that observation that among the campaigns that we had documented and for which we had kind of peak participation estimates, none of the campaigns that had moved above that 3.5% national population threshold had failed.

So I think the things to know about that are, first of all, it's a historical observation, not a prediction.

Second of all, as you know, historical observations are always just that.

They're not also prescriptive, which is the sense that if we, like, try to aim for 3.5%, knowing that that's the target, are we doing something different than what people did historically when they didn't know about that kind of a threshold and wouldn't have been trying to game it, as it were?

And then the third piece is that there have been, since that period, exceptions to the rule, which is to say, like Bahrain, for example, had its own attempted Arab awakening in 2011 that fizzled out fully by 2014.

And in that case, it looks like during their peak moment, they had about 6% of the population mobilized in their sort of central area.

And that ended up failing.

And one of the reasons that it was defeated is important and instructive.

It was defeated because there were no defections.

And there were no defections because in that case, the monarchy decided not to send its own troops out to repress and got help from Saudi Arabia to do it.

And that is a really important technique of preventing defections that we've then seen happen elsewhere.

And the logic is that if there are fewer kind of social connections between the security forces and the people protesting, that there will be less hesitation and brutality toward the protesters.