Revolution

In political science, a revolution (Latin: revolutio, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic or religious structures.

[1] According to sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elements at their core: (a) efforts to change the political regime that draw on a competing vision (or visions) of a just order, (b) a notable degree of informal or formal mass mobilization, and (c) efforts to force change through noninstitutionalized actions such as mass demonstrations, protests, strikes, or violence.

[2] Revolutions can be inspired by the rising popularity of certain political ideologies, moral principles, or models of governance such as nationalism, republicanism, egalitarianism, self-determination, human rights, democracy, liberalism, fascism, or socialism.

[4] A regime may become vulnerable to revolution due to a recent military defeat, or economic chaos, or an affront to national pride and identity, or pervasive repression and corruption.

First, a broad one, including "any and all instances in which a state or a political regime is overthrown and thereby transformed by a popular movement in an irregular, extraconstitutional or violent fashion".

At the same time, this definition is strong enough to exclude coups, revolts, civil wars, and rebellions that make no effort to transform institutions or the justification for authority.

"[2] Goldstone's definition excludes peaceful transitions to democracy through plebiscite or free elections, as occurred in Spain after the death of Francisco Franco, or in Argentina and Chile after the demise of their military juntas.

While these theorists varied in their approach as to what exactly incited the people to revolt (e.g., modernization, recession, or discrimination), they agreed that the primary cause for revolution was a widespread frustration with the socio-political situation.

In such a model, revolutions happen when two or more groups cannot come to terms within the current political system's normal decision-making process, and when they possess the required resources to employ force in pursuit of their goals.

This change then affects some critical variable—the cognitive state of the masses, the equilibrium of the system, or the magnitude of conflict and resource control of competing interest groups.

[9] In his influential 1938 book The Anatomy of Revolution, historian Crane Brinton established a convention by choosing four major political revolutions—England (1642), Thirteen Colonies of America (1775), France (1789), and Russia (1917)—for comparative study.

[10][2] For some historians, the traditional paradigm of revolutions as class struggle-driven conflicts centered in Europe, and involving a violent state versus its discontented people, was no longer sufficient to account for the multi-class coalitions toppling dictators around the world.

Political science research moved beyond individual or comparative case studies towards large-N statistical analysis assessing the causes and implications of revolution.

[30] Such analyses, like those by A. J. Enterline,[31] Zeev Maoz,[32] and Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder,[33] identified a revolution by a significant change in the country's score on Polity's autocracy-to-democracy scale.

Since the 2010s, scholars like Jeff Colgan have argued that the Polity data series—which evaluates the degree of democratic or autocratic authority in a state's governing institutions based on the openness of executive recruitment, constraints on executive authority, and political competition—is inadequate because it measures democratization, not revolution, and doesn't account for regimes which come to power by revolution but fail to change the structure of the state and society sufficiently to yield a notable difference in the Polity score.

[36] This would imply not only a focus on political behavior "from below", but also a recognition of moments where "high and low" are relativized, subverted, or made irrelevant, and where the micro and macro levels fuse together in critical conjunctions.