Thread by @EricaChenoweth

Excited to share this new article published today at @PLOSONE with @z_marks & Andrew Hocking. The paper compares movement strategies based on mass mobilization vs. targeted mobilization. Here's a brief 🧵 on how we did this & what we find. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…

In the paper, we develop a computational model that focuses on the interactive relationship between civilians, police, and influential pillars of a regime's support base--such as social, political, and economic elites.

We find that movements that mobilize even massive #s without adopting a broader strategy toward influencing these pillars are less likely to succeed, though this is particularly true when they are relatively modest in size.

Conversely, campaigns with a strategy that attempts to directly influence the decisions of pillars of support see greater returns on protest activity, even in contexts of limited mass participation.

Perhaps even more importantly, the most effective campaigns are not the ones that have the largest numbers. Instead, the most effective campaigns are the ones that focus on influencing the pillars who are the least loyal to the status quo.

This finding points to some key capacities for movements: (1) planning capacity to organize actions that induce defections among pillars; (2) intel capacity that can inform which pillars are the most likely to defect in the first place.

These capacities are hardest to develop in autocracies, where space for strategic planning among civil society groups is extremely curtailed & where the regime's pillars of support tend to keep their true preferences private until watershed moments (see work by @timurkuran).

However, these findings can help us to understand why, for instance, large-scale protests that do not target specific pillars can have surprisingly little effect, while small-scale actions that shape the behavior of key pillars can have a disproportionate impact on society.

(On the latter observation, see hks.harvard.edu/faculty-resear…)/ END

Here's a follow-up thread, for a deeper dive:

https://twitter.com/EricaChenoweth/status/1552639956241244162?s=20&t=QTF2r4FNPec-_Zt2jMWrbA