My paper studies the democratic dividend of revolutionary mass uprisings. Building on theoretical and empirical work on revolutions and democratization, I develop a “revolutionary pathways to democracy” framework that outlines four ideal-typical outcomes, conditional on tactic (violent vs. nonviolent) and success: nonviolent and violent conquest, nonviolent and violent coercion. I argue that mass mobilization is crucial in shaping democratic outcomes of uprisings, in contrast to few cases of top-down liberalization, due to higher legitimacy of mass movements and broad-based coalitions seeking stable and inclusive democratic post-uprising settlement, though effects still depend on the tactic.

I combine a global panel dataset on maximalist and revolutionary campaigns since the 20th century with a quasi-experimental approach. In the analysis, I employ panel data matching and synthetic control methods to estimate both short- and long-term democratic effects of uprisings, addressing problems of endogeneity and heterogeneous treatment effects. Such a methodology allows me to link pure quantitative research with quantitative case studies and estimate counterfactual trajectories.

The results show that nonviolent and pro-democratic uprisings, especially successful, induce significant democratic gains, whilst violent uprisings seem not to cause any significant pro-democratic effect. Quantitative case-study analysis shows that some cases still yield post-revolutionary autocratic dividends, such as the Cuban Revolution. The paper revisits scholarship on civil resistance and mass uprisings and reconceptualizes revolutionary mass uprisings as a distinct mode of contentious politics, separate from coups or single-issue protests, and illustrates the empirical potential of new causal inference methods in comparative politics and international relations.