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The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world (2019)
- rayiner 8mo agoThis seems anti democratic. How can we prevent small minorities from hassling everyone until they get their way?
- Jtsummers 8mo agoIn the US? You'd probably need to repeal the first amendment. Good luck with that.
- sabellito 8mo agoWhat if the small minority is being oppressed and killed? There are so many reasons why a small minority might need to protest within a democracy. "This seems anti democratic" is a bizarre take.
- lingrush4 8mo ago3.5% forcing their preferences on all the others is obviously anti-democratic. Unless you don't know what democracy means
- sabellito 8mo agoIt seems that it's you who needs more education on the topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
- Conscat 8mo agoIn the big picture, culture progresses towards equality over time, although it see-saws and moves very slowly relative to a human lifespan. Small minorities of hate groups, for example KKK, are not able to influence society in the long-run because their message is antithetical to this natural imperative. Whereas advocacy for racial minorities, gender minorities, and feminism progresses over time.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8mo agoI think that might be wishful thinking. It is privileging 200 of history verses several thousand years of human history.
- komali2 8mo agoSeveral thousand years of human history in fact argues for their point of tendency towards equality being a natural imperative, and artificially enforced caste systems being unnatural and instinctively distasteful to people. See Graber's last book before he died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything?wprov=s...
- hellgas00 8mo agoNothing says "instinctively distasteful caste systems" like the ongoing meat grinder in Gaza. Truly the pinnacle of humanity's natural drift toward equality.
- komali2 8mo agoThe majority of people are horrified when they become aware of what's happening in Gaza. Personally I think a large majority of those that support it are sheltered from the reality of it, e.g. avoid seeing images of assassinated children.
- tbrownaw 8mo ago> natural imperative It happens because trust me bro.
- fedeb95 8mo agoseems is the key word. 3.5% - or any other % - actively engaging doesn't mean that if you cast a vote, 3.5% would support. Probably an order of magnitude more. People tend to be inert, even when they agree with something. However, sometimes it is true that small minorities can hassle everyone until they get their way. This usually happens through lobbying, corruption and misinformation though, way easier than a peaceful protest if you are a small minority; with the added benefit of appearing to have a big majority of the population in your favor. See what populist far right movements are doing right now throughout the world.
- justsomehnguy 8mo agoYou declare what this is democratic. Declaring the same by a country from the other side of the planet also helps. Worked fine for a certain democratic country in 2014.
- seattle_spring 8mo agoHuh, never thought I'd see Rayiner agree that the electoral college is fundamentally anti-democratic.
- puppion 8mo agoThis rule didn't hold in Israel in the last 3 years. Well over 3.5% went to the streets and the government remains in tact.
- pedalpete 8mo agoI have no idea how many Iranians have been involved in the protests, but it seems like they're getting past the 3.5% number as well..
- steve-atx-7600 8mo agoPeaceful protests do not work when the government that you are opposing shoots protesters in the street and/or jails & tortures them. Didn’t work so well in Syria either. Only the government has guns in Iran and they’d rather rule over a hellish cesspool of their own countrymen starving and drying than lose power.
- eli_gottlieb 8mo agoAnd quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.
- stevenwoo 8mo agoSo far, if estimates are accurate, neither in Iran with 90 million population, more than five percent turned out.
- smallerize 8mo agoIt doesn't work if the opposition is also organized. For example, a March 2003 Gallup poll showed that 5% of the US population had made a public opposition to the Iraq war, but 21% had made a public display to support the war. Small minorities can't go directly against more popular movements.
- AnotherGoodName 8mo ago
- johnea 8mo ago[flagged]
- fred_is_fred 8mo agoYou didn’t read the article.
- johnea 8mo ago[flagged]
- anigbrowl 8mo agoPlease pull your head out of your rear. I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk, but you are not contributing anything of substance.
- johnea 8mo agoI don't see how your claim of lack-of-contribution is correct. I'm stating, to quote you "I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk". Additionally I'm stating that it really vastly depends on which 3.5% of the population you're talking about, as to weather they have the ability to make major changes to world wide economic policy. To me, this seems to contribute much more substance than "pull your head out of your rear"...
- graemep 8mo agoThis is plausible. Non violent groups will often have wider public support (because most people would prefer not to support violence) and if those in power use violence against the non-violent it increases public sympathy for them.
- input_sh 8mo ago> and if those in power use violence against the non-violent it increases public sympathy for them. Even then there's like a fine balancing line where some level of state violence is "acceptable", as in it crushes the spirits of those out on the streets before they manage to organise enough, and yet doesn't get nearly enough attention or wide-enough condemnation (both within and outside of the country). This buys the regime some time even when they're nowhere near 50% of support, and then the very next elections become even more of a sham than they were before. The regime still magically gets as close to 50% of the votes as possible, while still winning with a wide-enough margin that you have no legal recourse to challenge the elections, which only crushes people's spirits even further. For post-2019 examples, see Georgia (ruling party won with 53.93% in 2024) and Serbia (has yet to have an election, despite largest protests in its history calling for early elections for the past 15 months). My point being, to overthrow such a regime via a ballot box, 55% against just doesn't cut it. At the very least you need 70%.
- tstrimple 8mo agoNon-violence only works when there's an alternative that includes lots of violence. MLK Jr's messages only resonate thanks to the Black Panthers. Today we've got one explicitly violent political party and one who keeps writing letters politely asking them to stop the violence. Unfortunately the only language conservatives seem to understand is violence, and that is the response they deserve for their actions.
- jfengel 8mo ago(2019)
- alephnerd 8mo agoIran proved it wrong (the regime mobilized roughly 1% of the country's population to crack down on protesters) with regards to Single Party Regimes, and knowing people at the Ash Center, they are pessimistic about this as well.
- bananasandrice 8mo ago[flagged]
- AnotherGoodName 8mo agoIf you have 2+ groups with opposing views, each 3.5%+ it's pretty clear that at least one of the 3.5%+ groups will fail. Others here note it's really "3.5% if there's no one seriously opposing their objectives" but in my opinion that's a meaningless rule. Of course in those cases non-conflict resolves the issue.
- vog 8mo agoThis is far from meaningless, because if you are too far below those 3.5%, you'll fail to make a change for the better, despite having a good cause with no real opposition. Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.
- mihaic 8mo agoSuccess doesn't have to mean getting your way, but rather making a meaningful change in your direction. Even opposing groups often can find a way so that both get a better situation. For instance, taxes can overall be lowered while teacher salaries can increase on average at the same time, if excess money is taken from other activities.
- roenxi 8mo agoYeah but that probably isn't going to what the original research is saying. Society is basically run by a tiny fraction of people (1-5% of the population range) and the rest are just along for the ride. Democracy is a major innovation where the majority has to nod along every few years or there is a mix up in who in the upper class gets to sit at the top of the tree. From that perspective it becomes clearer what a 3.5% rule is getting at - 3.5% of the population mobilised is enough to overwhelm any ruling class that isn't on top of its game, especially if mass shooting of people is still of the table or if the 3.5% includes a lot of people from the upper classes. It isn't about whether an issue is supported by 3.5% of the population or more, it is a question of whether that fraction of society is actively trying to topple a government system.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 8mo agohttps://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- anigbrowl 8mo ago(2019) Chenoweth has backed off her previous conclusions in recent years, observing that nonviolent protest strategies have dramatically declined in effectiveness as governments have adjusted their tactics of repression and messaging. See eg https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/erica-chenoweth-democracy-data-harvard https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/erica-chenoweth-demo... One current example of messaging can be seen in the reflexive dismissal by the current US government and its propagandists of any popular opposition as 'paid protesters'. Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign, any crowd protesting government policy is described as either a rioting or alleged to be financed by George Soros or some other boogeyman of the right. This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
- yesco 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- EGreg 8mo agoI'm not sure it's an anomaly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM
- bad_haircut72 8mo agoThey didnt have to "force them to do what they want" just tip the balance of votes at the ballot box. For that aim protest seems like it could be quite effective.
- goatlover 8mo agoI don't understand this comment. What protesting does is let other people know there is dissent, and some people are willing to take to the streets. Enough people do that and you have networking effects as other people are motivated to take a stand. It makes the mainstream media, and representatives feel pressure to address the issue. I've been to a number of protests over the last year, and I can tell you there are even more people honking in support who drive by.
- hrdwdmrbl 8mo agoHong Kong proved this wrong too...
- Klaster_1 8mo agoBelarus too.
- marcosdumay 8mo agoThe world seems to have changed since the events that led to this conclusion (that were mostly way before 2019). Governments apparently learned how to assimilate protests and burn people down without any apparent violence, but still destroying their causes.
- andrepd 8mo agoOccupy Wall Street was a turning point for me. It's staggering how many things today follow directly from the 2008 gfc and its disastrous aftermath.
- Animats 8mo agoThe primary legacy of Occupy Wall Street is that "the 1%" became a meme. Enough so that policies are still evaluated on how they affect "the 1%" vs the rest of the population. The concentration of wealth in the US became much better known. It did not, however, reduce that concentration of wealth.
- WalterBright 8mo agoIndividuals can change the world, too. Lee Harvey Oswald, for one. Elon Musk, for another (in a totally different way). And Fritz Haber. Plenty more.
- komali2 8mo agoAssassination is fascinating for its ability to abruptly change a paradigm and the fact that it can be done by a single person, but it is extremely rare for a reason - murder is bad and instinctively despicable to most humans. [1] An assassination is also an acknowledgement of the magical power of one individual, which I think is counter to the goals of most revolutionaries, who want to instead demonstrate to the general population that power is within the capital p People, and communities, and organized resistance. Assassination is saying "actually this one person is so powerful that it'll solve a lot of our problems if they're dead." Which I don't believe can be true since to be true that would mean that one person would basically have to be a wizard with supernatural powers. In reality anybody with a lot of political power derives that power from people's willingness to comply with that person's wishes. A system like a government may have made people used to the idea of obeying authority, but the reality remains such that if everyone suddenly decided to stop holding up the system of government, the power vanishes into thin air. Thus a despot's power is able to be nullified by anyone able to convince a lot of people to refuse to implement the despot's desires. [1] https://voicesofvr.com/1182-recreating-philosophical-moral-dilemmas-in-vr-the-gamers-dilemma-virtual-ethics/ https://voicesofvr.com/1182-recreating-philosophical-moral-d...
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago(2019) Some previous discussion: 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378867 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458241
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- runako 8mo agoThis rule was obviously silly (and Chenoweth herself didn't suggest it was a hard rule) given that we know e.g. Mississippi had an engaged, vocal opposition in active protest, and that opposition was far larger than 3.5% of the population. And yet, the authoritarianism there persisted for nearly a century.
- nine_k 8mo ago"All progress depends on the unreasonable man", by definition a minority. Not only progress, sadly, but almost any change. Those who care are few and far between, and this is why they wield outsized power.
- tstrimple 8mo agoThe largest voting group in the US are non-voters. As bad as conservatives are, the non-voters are complicit in letting it happen. Hope they enjoy their taste of "both sides are the same".
- nine_k 8mo agoThe US political system badly needs a reasonable third side. Both sides have gone really bad, and arguably lost their contact with the majority of voters.
- komali2 8mo agoCompletely agree since both sides in the USA is two conservative parties. Luckily there seems to be an actual opposition finally arriving in the form of the Social Democrats.
- tstrimple 8mo agoFundamentals of the electoral system make this almost impossible. See spoiler effects where your campaign and your next closest competitor are split, and your polar opposite claims the win. The majority wanted one of the two more popular options, but the person with only a fraction of overall support gets the win. There are plenty of better voting systems but entrenched powers and "American Exceptionalism" means nothing will ever change. I'd love to abandon the Democratic party. They have proven themselves to be useless in all the decades of my voting life. But they aren't blatantly evil and corrupt like Republicans. Democrats are at best a feeble foil to Republican bullshit, but they are literally the only foil that exists to choose from.
- 8mo ago
- dyauspitr 8mo ago3.5% have to go the the streets, stay on the streets and start causing enough disruption for long enough. It also needs to have barbs.
- ppqqrr 8mo agoin a world where getting 3 people to show up to dinner is a challenge, a coherent, organized group large enough to be visible as a percentage of the population is an exceedingly rare and powerful entity. but history shows that such an entity is usually either 1) stable and peaceful, but actively decaying due to its position of hegemony or 2) unstable and violent, using conflict to sharply define its boundaries and growing by dividing the rest of society into "insiders" and "outsiders". some days i feel like we're microbes stuck in microbiological cycles. but if we make it past this rut, we will have all that we need to lay down an even stronger foundation, to codify systems and organizations designed to scatter and suppress hate and intolerance.
- zeckalpha 8mo agoThe right has their version of this meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters
- ppqqrr 8mo agoanyone who has to look that far back in history for examples of righteous resistance… is serious about neither history or resistance.
- quercus 8mo ago* Except when the 3.5% is entirely geriatric women.
- CGMthrowaway 8mo agoRelated: "The Most Intolerant Wins" (2016). The idea is that a small, determined group of people can change how everyone behaves because when the group won’t compromise, it’s often easier to adapt than to work around them. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- komali2 8mo agoKeith McHenry of "Food Not Bombs" made an argument for nonviolent resistance in his version of "The Anarchist Cookbook," available for free download https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html He also included a choice selection of some of the most milquetoast, boring, American-coded vegan recipes I've ever seen in my life. His argument was not really a neoliberal "just protest bro trust me bro fascists are so scared of protests" one and more an argument against armed uprising by leftists, thinking they can establish communism or anarchism with this method. He pointed to other attempts to do so in history and how even when these attempts succeeded in overthrowing the establishment, it inevitably established a system of rule predicated on violence. A famous example can be the successful communist revolution in what became the PRC, that degraded into the cultural revolution and police state, and resulted in a bourgeoisie state with spicy capitalism. Andreas Malm also took a relatively anti violent perspective in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," though he analyzed the usefulness of a small subset of incredibly violent people functioning as a contrast to the vast majority of dissidents who then look much more reasonable. He also spent a lot of time arguing for the importance of having a mind for marketing - no, Extinction Rebellion, you have not done praxis if the most visible outcome of your Action is a photo of a white protestor in a suit kicking a black blue collar worker off a ladder. I can't really argue with McHenry's chops as a praxis anarchist, he after all does more in a week than I've done in my life, feeding people constantly and helping to organize the global Food Not Bombs movement and all its spinoffs. I also agree logically with his arguments that bringing violence to dissident movements invited hyper violent state suppression applied as a blanket against all dissidents, violent or otherwise, so basically nonconsensually subjects everyone to violence. That said, in his own words, it took two decades of being super duper polite to the SFPD before they finally, and only occasionally, backed his group up by neglecting to enforce orders to disperse their food giveaways. Other than that, there's been no establishment of any Food Not Bombs autonomous zones, no reliable farm to mouths food supply chain, no syndicalizion, no significant political organization. I doubt many here have even heard of Food Not Bombs despite them being founded in the heart of Silicon Valley. Their immediate mutual aid effects: undeniably some of the most widespread in the world in the last few decades. Their long term impact? More doubtful, imo. See also: no communist revolution with any teeth in the last 70 years. The only anarchist breakaway with any success is the Kurds who aren't really even anarchists or communists (but are very interesting to study), and in the last two decades plenty of successful examples of utterly suppressed mostly nonviolent resistance: Hong Kong, the PRC bank run protests and COVID protests, all Palestinian resistance bombed to oblivion, Venezuela's failed resistance to Maduro's election fraud. An exception I'm aware of is the student uprising in Taiwan known as the "Sunflower Protests" which completely halted the government's attempt to sell itself to the PRC. But one decade later a similar protest occured which failed to prevent the KMT from seizing a ton of new extra legislative power so, win some, lose some. I feel like we can always learn from the past, but the methods of States to persist themselves is evolving, and so dissidents need to evolve as well. I emailed Cory Doctorow about this because his "Walkaway" novel illustrated a method to me that seems the most viable in the modern era: basically techno-anarchism, leveraging technology to establish post scarcity zones where "the right to well-being, well-being for all" is established and State incursions are repelled by highly targeted appeals to the family and friends of gestapo agents found through facial recognition. It's a good bit of speculative fiction with other fun technology, strong recommend to nerds. Anyway, he suggested the same general advice: solidarity first, then methodology. > Broadly: find groups that are bound together by solidarity and join them. Then, if you think they're not doing effective things, work with those people, in solidarity, to do more effective things. Mutual aid groups. DSA. Anti-ICE patrols. Unions. Solidarity first, tactics second. Solidarity will get you through times of bad tactics better than good tactics will get you through times of no solidarity. Your spectacular lone actions will get you nowhere if no one is willing to post your bail or de-arrest you at a protest. Getting from small groups that are bonded by solidarity to a profound change in the American system is hard, and a lot of work, which is why we need to start now. So lacking any other ideas, I continue to do this, but I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new strategies. As much as I'm interested in highly impactful things individuals can do (like making fake Lockheed Martin verified Twitter accounts and posting things that wipe billions off their stock value), it's seeming more and more to me that the most valuable skill any individual can acquire in service of resisting oppressive governments is rhetoric (which includes e.g. marketing ability).
- BitsAndObjects 8mo agoWritten by the BBC in the years shortly after Brexit, the article had homegrown counter-evidence to its basic premise. 3.5% might work sometimes. At other times, it achieves as much as pissing into the wind.
- intalentive 8mo agoSuccessful protest movements are typically successful because they are organized and/or leveraged by a counter elite or foreign actor. One example is the CIA orchestrating protests to topple the PM of Iran in 1953. Protest movements lacking elite or foreign state sponsorship (like the yellow vests in France, Occupy Wall St, or the Canada truckers) tend to wither away by attrition, get infiltrated and redirected, or else are dispersed by force.
- globalnode 8mo agowhile the non violent protests may not be as effective anymore, i think the point is that if those 3.5% are "organised and coordinated" they will be effective. can you think of any other organised minorities trying to change the world right now? ahem ahem... also explains why govts and businesses are afraid of this and why we have things like mass surveillance and union breakers.
- mizzao 8mo agoCurrent US population: 348 million 3.5% of that: 12 million No Kings protest attendance, Oct 18 2025: ~7 million
- selecsosi 8mo agoI would recommend anyone interest in the topic to check out the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn. The author covers (in depth) a solid analysis of the failures to enact long term change across several major "revolutionary" movements over the last couple year (including the Arab Spring and Occupy among others). I think his analysis is quite good and points at significant issues in organizational leadership, co-opting, and other structural failures (or adaptations by governments) that illustrate classic approaches to mass protest are more difficult to achieve desired goals in modern times. Worth a read if you have the time.
- Jun8 8mo agoSociologist Zeynep Tufekci's book Twitter and Teargas explains why, for protest movements to be successful they should have charismatic leaders and decentralized mass protest movements have a much harder time succeeding: https://www.twitterandteargas.org https://www.twitterandteargas.org
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- aeternum 8mo agoYet another "trust the science" statistic. This isn't actual science, it's tabloid news.
- surume 8mo agoI guess BBC has never heard of Iran. They easily passed the 3.5%, so the government “reduced the percentage”. BBC, you are completely disconnected from reality.
- tbrownaw 8mo ago> Regarding the “3.5% rule”, she points out that while 3.5% is a small minority, such a level of active participation probably means many more people tacitly agree with the cause. The more effective you are at getting people to participate, the less effective that participation will appear to be. Because it's just a proxy for what actually matters.
- pjdesno 8mo agoDespite whatever the NRA says, governments have a near-monopoly on violence. They've got all the good weapons - Google "Neal Brennan Has a Plan to Test the 2nd Amendment" for a humorous take on this. That leaves non-violence, which is perhaps a misnomer - there's often plenty of violence, but it's used by the government, not its opponents. When non-violence works, it's typically because those working for the government start refusing to kill their fellow countrymen - they defect, in non-violence scholar-speak. There's an authoritarian playbook for countering this - you recruit your forces from ethnic minorities, often rural, who already hate the people who are protesting. Thus you see ICE recruits from the Deep South and National Guard troops from Texas being sent into Northern cities.
- ndkap 8mo agoIn Nepal, on Sep 8, teenagers and GenZ organized peaceful protests. They were there on school uniform -- but 21+ were killed on a single day of peaceful protest. The next day, all 3 branches of the government were burned -- the legislative, the executive and the judiciary too. Even the Fox News equivalent (Kantipur) was burned. I think people always opt for peaceful protest at first, but when that is made impossible, people go for the violent one. MLK was successful because there was the threat of Malcolm X. Same thing with Gandhi.
- hnfong 8mo ago2019... the timing of the article is impeccable. Pretty sure more than 3.5% of the people in Hong Kong was protesting a couple weeks after the article came out. It took the CCP about two years and a COVID lockdown to get things under control.
- specproc 8mo agoUK, Iraq war. 2 million out of a population of 60 million, so 3.3 percent. Not even close to regime change, let alone policy.
- fleroviumna 8mo ago[dead]
- seec 8mo agoWell, if you define any change as success, I guess that's true. But the reality is that the change that happened is rarely what was requested, nor what was needed. Power just shifts hands, and small concessions are made to keep appearances. Real change doesn't come from protest but from generalized behavioral change. Some protests are successful because they bring an issue to enough people that they change behavior with enough volume that it ends up making a difference. Outside of that, I'm really skeptical.
- tsoukase 8mo agoNot even 35% of regular people cannot change anything if they are inorganised. But much less than 3.5, namely politician, billionaires and some more can make a great difference. The only case that a small minority can bring a change is the undecided group at elections.
- phendrenad2 8mo agoThis only works if you get the right 3.5% (or maybe the right 1% or even 0.5%). Most people just do and believe whatever their friends and family do. The free spirits are the ones you want to convince, because everyone else follows.