While classic works see democratization as rooted in distributive conflict, empirical findings remain mixed: inequality is not a prerequisite for democratization and its post-transition dynamics vary across authoritarian backgrounds. Nonviolent revolutions in turn tend to occur in societies with high but not extreme inequality. Their economic consequences, however, are less studied than those of violent revolutions. Only Beissinger shows civic revolutions to be less effective at reducing inequality than social revolutions, yet without comparing them to other mechanisms of democratization.

Using Dorsch and Maarek’s framework, in which unequal autocracies become more equal after democratization and vice versa, we hypothesize that nonviolent revolutionary democratization amplifies inequality-reducing effects by replacing entrenched elites and enabling long-term redistributive reforms. For more equal authoritarian regimes, we expect a stronger post-transition rise in inequality aligned with instability of newborn democratizing regimes. Drawing on the World Inequality Database, NAVCO and ERT datasets, we employ event analysis with staggered adoption.

Democratization and successful nonviolent revolutions separately have similar average effects, but revolutionary democratization reduces inequality about twice as much as any other democratization in highly unequal societies, especially for wealth inequality. Compared to electoral and elite-driven transitions — which show no stable significant effect — revolutionary pathways also reduce inequality in societies even with median pre-transition levels, while results are ambiguous for previously equal states. Panel matching confirms these patterns. We conclude that revolutionary movements impose equality-oriented reforms throughout democratization due to relying on diverse societal groups that are usually a part of successful revolution.