Revolutions

It is a puzzle that although the liberties of the West were to a large degree codified for the first time as a result of revolutions—in the Netherlands in 1566, in England in 1640, in the U.S. in 1776, and in France in 1789—in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America revolutions have more often resulted in regimes inimical to liberty.

“Revolution” is a much-debated term. I use it to denote changes in national leadership that are brought about by widespread acts of insurrection, and that result in new institutions of government or new bases for status. By “acts of insurrection,” I mean behavior contrary to prevailing laws, including tax strikes, land seizures, mass demonstrations, labor strikes, guerilla actions, and riots. Such activity may, but need not, include violence. In fact, in many major revolutions, including the Iranian and the French, the Old Regime fell and new institutions of government were erected with very little violence. In these cases, most violence occurred after the Old Regime had fallen, as the new rulers defended themselves against internal and external challenges.

Revolutions are not simple phenomena, but a convergence of social processes that can occur in other combinations—popular uprisings, government collapse, civil war, state-building. Thus, explaining a revolution is a complex task involving explanation of each of its components: Why were key groups hostile toward the regime? Why did state power fail? Why did internal conflict escalate? Why was state-building successful? And, perhaps most important, why did state-building follow one path rather than others?

Structural Vulnerabilities

To date, most scholarship has focused on the first two questions. Here, a marked shift in understanding has occurred, largely due to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). In a reaction against psychological and system-disequilibrium approaches, several authors in the late 1970s argued that mere discontent or generalized “strains” were not enough to bring about revolution. Skocpol’s book, which compared the French, Chinese, and Russian Revolutions, observed that the “strains” or “discontent” faced by these societies were not exceptional by historical standards. Instead, Skocpol demonstrated that these states failed, and aroused a hostile reaction from their populaces, because of certain vulnerabilities in the structure of state administration and local control. Specifically, these were states whose tax systems and economic organization did not provide them with revenues sufficient to meet the demands of international competition and conflict with more advanced states. These conditions led state leaders to assault the traditional tax structure, posing problems for elites who had benefitted from that structure. Where elites had enough autonomy to resist, they were able to paralyze the state. This was often the elites’ undoing, for where elites depended on the central authorities to maintain local law and order, paralysis of the central government allowed popular anti-elite feelings to break into the open. In short, it was structural vulnerabilities, namely, inadequate fiscal systems and elites that were autonomous from the state, yet dependent on central authority for local dominance, that created the conditions for revolutions.

Skocpol’s work, along with work by Charles Tilly, Jeffrey Paige, Ellen Trimberger, and others, created a radical reorientation of the study of revolution (see Revolutions: Comparative, Historical and Theoretical Studies, J. Goldstone, ed. [San Deigo: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986], for excerpts and summaries). In the 1960s and early 1970s revolutions were examined by studying “societies” in general. Theoretically, this meant that models of discontent or strain were developed by looking at characteristics that were more or less present in all societies. Empirically, this meant that hypotheses were tested by examining sets of as many “societies” as possible—that is, large cross-national data sets. The works of Skocpol and others have changed this by emphasizing the structural factors that made some states more vulnerable to revolutions than others. Thus theoretical work now consists of better specifying the state structures, elite organization, and agrarian relations that make for vulnerability to violent change. Empirical studies of revolution using large cross-national data sets have virtually disappeared. Empirical work now consists of careful examination of a few selected cases designed to highlight the crucial structural differences between nations, or to illuminate how particular forces—such as population growth or international competition—acted on social structures in a particular historical setting to create a revolutionary crisis.

Yet this work raised further questions. Given that revolutions develop from the convergence of varied conditions and conflicts, what causes such convergence to occur at certain historical periods and not at others? How do more modern revolutions, such as those in Iran and Nicaragua, resemble or differ from the more traditional “great” revolutions that are the primary focus of these works? If so much is explained by considering how different state and elite structures respond to international pressures, what is the role of ideology in revolutions? And if revolution is a “state crisis,” rather than a hump in the road to modernization, what do revolutions actually change?

All these issues require closer examination of the actual process of revolution, that is, the escalation of insurrection and of the trajectory of state-building in different cases. To date, these issues have only begun to be explored.

Robert Dix (“Varieties of Revolution,” Comparative Politics, 1983) has argued that more recent revolutions, as in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran, differ from past “great” revolutions in being less dependent on peasant uprisings and more dependent on urban insurrections. Dix suggests that this pattern is liable to be the more common mode of revolution in the future, with consequences that are not easily foreseen.

Revolutionary Outcomes

In regard to results, Jonathan Kelley and Herbert Klein have provocatively argued that the initial successes of revolutions in rectifying inequity will generally lead to “the rebirth of inequality” (“Revolution and the Rebirth of Inequality, American Journal of Sociology, 1977). Yet their conclusion is modified by Susan Eckstein’s empirical work on the outcomes of Latin American revolutions (“The Impact of Revolution on Social Welfare in Latin America, Theory and Society, 1982). Eckstein demonstrated that revolutionary outcomes vary in a number of dimensions in response to differing initial economic endowments, the choice of capitalist or socialist principles for economic reconstruction, and the composition of the revolutionary coalition. Eckstein finds that postrevolutionary regimes have been able to provide greater equality in access to land, basic medical services, and education than regimes in similar states that did not undergo revolutions. However, industrialization has had an inegalitarian effect on incomes, and state-building an inegalitarian effect on stratification, in postrevolutionary as well as in nonrevolutionary developing states. Thus revolutions have had a lasting redistributive effect on certain assets and services, although none has been able to overcome the general tendency of complex polities to stratify wealth and power.

There is probably no issue more in need of further research, and more important for policy, than the determinants of the outcomes of revolutions. Recent experience in U.S. policy has shown that it is often futile to attempt to support unpopular authoritarian regimes that are losing their grip. However, what proved disastrous for the liberties of these nations was not the fall of a Shah or of a Somoza, but the eventual drift of these revolutions to ideologically rigid and increasingly authoritarian rule. Is the Philippines headed in the same direction, or will it avoid this denouement and achieve democracy? At this point it is difficult to tell, not chiefly because we lack data, but because we lack an established theory of revolutionary outcomes.

Ideology

On matters of ideology, much is still debated. Mary Fulbrook’s Piety and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) demonstrated that the degree to which the Protestant Reformation was revolutionary in early modern Europe depended less on the content of that ideology than on the nature of church-state-elite relations in various states. Only where the state was already in conflict with elites, and the latter could use Reformation ideology to attack the state (as in England), did Protestantism have revolutionary impact; elsewhere, as in Prussia, the Reformation could be co-opted and absorbed as a prop to absolutist rule. Said Arjomand similarly found for the recent Iranian Revolution that Sh’ite ideology did not cause the Shah’s fall (“Iran’s Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective,” World Politics 1986). Instead ideology was used as a tool for popular mobilization by elites already in conflict with the Shah over an economic policy that discriminated against bazaar merchants and traditional manufacture, and over state corruption and centralization that excluded the professional and middle classes from effective participation in governance. Still, the content of Puritanism and of Shi’ism did have an important impact on the outcomes of these revolutions. Once introduced into the discourse of legitimacy, Puritanism carried strong egalitarian and antimonarchical messages into English politics; Shi’ism had a similar, although more thoroughly theocratic, impact in Iran. I have argued, from a comparison of the Puritan Revolution with seventeenth-century political crises in Asia, that how ideology is used in state-building following revolutionary crises makes a crucial difference in whether the emergent state will tolerate liberty or will enforce rigid orthdoxy and conformism (“Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation, Sociological Theory, 1987). Two matters of great importance in current scholarly debates regarding politics have had as yet only a modest or ambiguous role in the study of revolutions. First, much research in political science today is motivated by the application of rational choice theory to political behavior. Yet rational choice models have had little success in explaining revolutions, in large part because their main contribution has been to show that it is “irrational,” given the high costs and uncertain benefits, for individuals to engage in rebellious activity. Recently, however, Edward Mueller and Karl Dieter-Opp have shown empirically that actors in protest movements do not calculate the costs and benefits of their actions individually, but see themselves as members of groups, and hence see their rebellious actions as contributions to a public good (“Rational Choice and Rebellious Collective Action,” American Political Science Review, 1986). I have further discussed the likelihood of rebellion using a “modified rational choice” model based on how groups estimate the costs and benefits of rebellion, including a consideration of “legitimacy” in terms of the diffuse benefits that may accrue to regimes from respecting certain principles of governance (“Revolution and Deterrence,” in R. Axelrod, et. al., ed. Perspectives on Deterrence [Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1988]). Second, the causes of war continue to be a pressing problem. Yet the relationship between war and revolution has only been very slightly explored on a systematic basis. Michael Stohl, who has surveyed the existing literature, has found no clear relationship between war and revolution that holds across time and space (“The Nexus of Civil and International Conflict,” in Handbook of Political Conflict, Ted Robert Gurr, ed. [New York: Free Press, 1976]). In a prospective essay, Ted Robert Gurr (“War, Revolution, and the Growth of the Coercive State,” Comparative Political Studies, 1988) does argue that revolutionary states that were formerly weak and threatened in the international arena often evolve into “garrison states,” which are highly likely to be involved in international conflicts (e.g., China in Korea, Vietnam in Cambodia). But these findings are preliminary. Both the role of rational choice models and the war-revolution nexus are “underdeveloped regions” in the study of revolution.