In recent years, the question of what form a revolutionary uprising will take – armed or unarmed – has been raised more often. This is because, as shown by numerous studies, revolutionary nonviolence can explain why an uprising fails or succeeds to lead to democracy. In the recent decades the likelihood of revolution being nonviolent appears to have significantly increased, but it is still not clear why this tendency is observed. Moreover, there are only a few quantitative cross-national studies on this topic, in which the authors tried to explain the apparent pattern. However, none of them considered political factors separately. This article tests the hypothesis that a country’s level of democracy can inhibit the armed revolutionary violence. By applying logistic regression to the NAVCO database, the authors analyze more than 400 revolutionary episodes and conclude that, in general, the more democratic the political system, the more likely the revolution take an unarmed form. Nevertheless, various revolutionary events could be of a rather different nature, and it is further shown that the level of democracy matters only for sociopolitical revolutions, while for ethno-separatist revolutions it does not play a significant role.

中文翻译：

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革命与民主

近年来，人们更频繁地提出革命起义将采取何种形式——武装还是非武装——的问题。这是因为，正如许多研究表明的那样，革命性的非暴力可以解释为什么起义失败或成功导致民主。近几十年来，非暴力革命的可能性似乎显着增加，但仍不清楚为什么会出现这种趋势。此外，只有少数关于该主题的定量跨国研究，作者在这些研究中试图解释明显的模式。但是，他们都没有单独考虑政治因素。本文检验了一个国家的民主水平可以抑制武装革命暴力的假设。通过将逻辑回归应用于NAVCO公司数据库中，作者分析了 400 多个革命事件并得出结论，一般来说，政治制度越民主，革命越有可能采取非武装形式。然而，各种革命事件可能具有相当不同的性质，并且进一步表明，民主水平仅对社会政治革命重要，而对民族分离主义革命则没有重要作用。