When the Time Is Right: Regime Legitimacy as a Predictor of Nonviolent Protest Outcome

Abstract

According to nonviolent strategist Gene Sharp, legitimate authority is a fundamental source of political power.1 Following Sharp, this paper explores the role of regime legitimacy in affecting the outcome of protest movements, finding that protest success or failure can be predicted through an analysis of the ruling regime’s political legitimacy. The first part of the paper conceptualizes regime legitimacy and discusses some specific causal means through which the level of legitimacy may serve to influence protest success. The second part utilizes this concept of regime legitimacy on two contrasting cases—the 1980s Solidarity movement in Poland and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. On the basis of this analysis, part three thereupon operationalizes a scale of quantitative measurement for regime legitimacy and constructs a data set of twenty‐three cases of nonviolent protest with regime legitimacy scores, obtaining a clear division between high‐legitimacy cases where protest failed and low‐legitimacy cases where protest succeeded. Part four finally tests this model on a set of twelve new cases taken from the 2011 Arab Spring, obtaining a range of predictions that so far converge with how these cases have played out.