What’s so special about 3.5 percent?

5 million people protesting for democracy is a very big deal

Last Saturday, per Strength in Numbers, between four and six million Americans came out to protest against the White House. That means, on a single day, somewhere between one and two percent of the population of the United States was at the same coordinated protest.

That is a lot of people.

In fact, the No Kings protests were one of the largest — if not the largest — mobilization of their kind in the history of the country, significantly exceeding the Women’s March of 2017.

And when we start talking in terms of percentages of the population, it’s not long before you’ll hear a specific number: 3.5 percent.

What’s so special about 3.5 percent?

The “3.5 percent rule,” coined by one of Protect Democracy’s advisors, Erica Chenoweth, notes that empirically “no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”

Basically, when nonviolent social and pro-democracy movements reach a certain critical mass, they overwhelmingly tend to succeed. To be clear, there are a lot of caveats and limitations (more on those in a second), but this means the United States is quickly approaching the level of civic and pro-democracy mobilization that has, globally speaking, almost uniformly prevailed against repressive regimes.

The 3.5 percent rule is descriptive, not predictive

To be crystal clear, this is not some magic formula. The rule doesn’t mean that, if protestors in the United States hit 3.5 percent, all of this is automatically resolved, the autocratic faction goes away, and democracy endures. Rather, the 3.5 percent rule is a pattern; it’s a trend that seems to hold across the world.

As Dr. Chenoweth wrote earlier this year:

The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future. … The 3.5% participation metric may be useful as a rule of thumb in most cases; however, other factors—momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability—are likely as important as large-scale participation in achieving movement success and are often precursors to achieving 3.5% participation.

I think of mobilization as if it were a tonic for the disease of autocracy.

In general, if you get an infection — say, strep or pneumonia — then antibiotics will likely overcome the disease. We know that they are likely to work because they’ve clearly been effective in the past. There’s no guarantee, and there obviously are times when the cure doesn’t work. But the pattern is clear and important.

The same thing is true for protest.

Additionally, as Chenoweth has found, just because the 3.5 percent level seems significant, that doesn’t mean movements will fail unless they reach that scale. For mobilizations between 1 and 3.5 percent of the population — the range that we’re in if this energy is sustained — they find that movements still succeed over 60 percent of the time.

What does the 3.5 percent rule mean for the United States?

My view: The specific percentage matters a lot less than the overall takeaway — mass protest movements are effective at combating autocracy. Large-scale mobilization is a critical tool in the anti-authoritarian playbook.

As my colleague Jennifer Dresden, a comparative political scientist, notes:

Democracy is fundamentally participatory, and so is defending it. Nonviolent protest movements have been a key component of challenging authoritarians in cases around the world, particularly when they happen at scale. Large protests show people who might dislike authoritarian actions that they aren’t alone in their views and that they can stand up and get involved without being “fringe” or “extreme.” It normalizes opposition and gives voice to what people might think privately, but be afraid to express in other ways. Large protests also give people courage and a sense of solidarity, something we know is important to avoiding anticipatory obedience.

Before No Kings Day, there was a widespread impression — especially among media and pundits — that protest movements were not a major factor in the second Trump administration. This narrative was only true for about the first two weeks after Inauguration Day. Since early February, protest activity this year has vastly overshadowed 2017.

According to Chenoweth’s Crowd Counting Consortium, here’s the cumulative number of protests this year and in 2017.

To some degree, the dismissive attitude towards protest still exists. (Just look at the relatively scant mainstream press coverage of what may have been the largest protest in U.S. history.) But the illusion that Americans aren’t protesting is crumbling fast.

Protest movements work because they are impossible to ignore. I suspect the vast majority of Americans saw protests last weekend, either in person or on social media. That visibility, that loudness, it challenges the would-be autocrat’s illusion of invulnerability. If that many people are willing to publicly oppose, maybe criticism of those in power isn’t so dangerous after all?

This in turn encourages other actors — politicians, judges, military — to not blindly follow the White House no matter what.

Watch this clip of my colleague Amanda Carpenter on MSNBC on what the No Kings protests accomplished:

This is a beginning not an end. Pro-democracy protest movements are not a one-time thing. They must be sustained. We’ll have more in coming weeks on how to sustain this momentum — if you have tips or ideas, please let us know in the comments below. But bottom line: Courage is contagious.

The protests we saw last weekend were joyful, nonviolent, and inspiring. Those emotions are, on a basic human level, infectious.

More next week.