This article explores the conditions under which revolutionary mass uprisings are likely to occur. We offer a probabilistic explanation of the social and political conditions that make people rise against autocrats. The article presents a medium-n dataset of 79 revolutionary mass uprisings in 165 autocracies since 1945. Since revolutions are rare events, a combination of factors must come together to trigger them. Drawing on the extant literature on revolutionary change, we find initial support for a range of discrete factors. Our findings suggest that four such factors are particularly powerful explanations of revolutionary mass uprisings—and a combination of those factors will go a long way in predicting revolutionary change: a history of protracted low-level popular contention; the presence of personalist regimes; long tenure of incumbents in office; and the showroom effect of uprisings in the temporal and spatial vicinity of states. In a broader theoretical perspective, these findings give rise to a breaking-point explanation of revolutionary situations, emphasizing that mass uprisings build up over time, whereas structuralist theories or grievance-based approaches fare less well in predicting revolutionary ruptures.

中文翻译：

---

专制政权下的革命性群众起义

本文探讨了可能发生革命性群众起义的条件。我们对促使人们反抗独裁者的社会和政治条件提供了概率解释。本文展示了自 1945 年以来在 165 个专制国家中发生的 79 次革命性群众起义的中 n 数据集。由于革命是罕见事件，必须综合多种因素才能触发它们。借鉴有关革命性变革的现存文献，我们发现对一系列离散因素的初步支持。我们的研究结果表明，四个这样的因素是对革命群众起义的特别有力的解释——这些因素的结合将对预测革命变革大有帮助：长期的低级别民众争论的历史；个人主义政权的存在；任职者长期任职；以及国家时空附近起义的陈列室效应。从更广泛的理论角度来看，这些发现对革命形势提出了突破性的解释，强调群众起义是随着时间的推移而建立的，而结构主义理论或基于不满的方法在预测革命破裂方面表现不佳。