What do women gain from successful revolutions
Explainer of Ammons et al. (2025), Journal of Institutional Economics. Not the journal article.
Citation: Ammons, J., Shakya, S., & Callais, J. T. (2025). What do women get from a successful revolution? Journal of Institutional Economics. Free PDF
Facts¶
Main finding¶
Nonviolent revolutions with explicit regime change intentions consistently yield positive and statistically significant improvements across multiple women’s empowerment dimensions - particularly political empowerment, civil liberties, and civil society participation. Violent revolutions demonstrate more ambiguous and less statistically strong effects even after controlling for regime change intention, suggesting that the method of transformation (violent vs. nonviolent) significantly predicts women’s post-revolutionary gains.
One caveat¶
Effectiveness significantly mediated by context-specific factors, institutional barriers, and intersectional dynamics. In settings with entrenched patriarchal norms or specific party structures, numerical presence of women does not guarantee influence on policy or institutional design. Post-revolutionary institutional capacity, organized feminist movements, and international pressure all interact with revolutionary pathway to determine actual women’s empowerment results.
Policy hook¶
Revolutions transform institutions at a basic level. The question for gender equality is whether the revolutionary pathway - violent versus nonviolent - shapes women’s post-revolutionary empowerment differently. Both claim to pursue justice and institutional reform, but violent and nonviolent revolutions may build different post-revolutionary institutions with divergent consequences for women’s rights.
Data and setting¶
Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Results (NAVCO) dataset on successful revolutions; Varieties of Democracy dataset for gender-specific measures; 1950-2019; multiple countries globally. Outcome measures include women’s political participation, economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and power distribution across multiple indices.
Research design (plain language)¶
Fixed-effect difference-in-differences and Callaway Sant’Anna (2021) methodology applied to staggered treatment adoption in heterogeneous settings. Event study analyses examining effects over time post-revolution. Separate analyses for violent and nonviolent revolutions with explicit regime change intentions as the treatment variable.
PDF or DOI¶
Why it matters¶
Women’s movements often face a targeted choice: work within existing institutions (reform) or support revolutionary change. This paper shows that nonviolent revolutions more reliably translate into women’s institutional gains than violent revolutions. For women’s rights advocates, the implication is that revolutionary strategy matters - the same goal (regime change) pursued through different means produces different gender results. The stronger results for nonviolent paths may reflect institutional design (nonviolent movements may build in inclusive principles more deeply) or coalition requirements (nonviolent movements require wider social participation, including women). For international donors and multilateral institutions supporting post-conflict reconstruction or democratic transitions, the finding suggests putting first support for gender-inclusive institution-building in nonviolent transition settings. The work also complicates stories about violence as liberation - revolutionary violence does not automatically liberate women even when it topples authoritarian regimes.