In recent years, the question of what form a revolutionary uprising will take — armed or unarmed — has been raised more and more often. This is because, as shown by numerous studies, revolutionary nonviolence can explain why the uprising failed or succeed 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 paper tests the hypothesis that a country’s level of democracy can inhibit the spread of revolutionary violence. By applying logistic regression to the NAVCO database, we analyze 400 episodes and conclude that, in general, the more democratic the political system, the more likely the revolution take a nonviolent form. Nevertheless, the 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 separatist revolutions it does not play a significant role. In other words, democracy can stop effectively violence only in revolutionary episodes caused by sociopolitical (but not ethno-nationalist) grievances.

Is there a relationship between education and the type of revolutionary action – violent or nonviolent? Past studies found a positive relationship between the education and nonviolence, but the influence that education produces on the form that revolution takes has not yet been explored. This paper examines it at a cross-national level with an analysis of 470 NAVCO ‘maximalist campaigns’ and 265 revolutionary events recorded between 1950 and 2020. Tests using logistic regression and our own index support the hypothesis that mean years of schooling is a usable, strong and consistently significant predictor of the unarmed form of revolutionary action. Moreover, it is also found that education has the highest pacifying effect in the early stages of modernization, but then this effect gradually decreases and in developed countries education has a less strong pacifying effect.