Why would it only take a small minority of the population engaging in active resistance to create change?

begin partial quote from: 3.5 percent of a population

 

 CARR CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POLICY2
Why would it only take a small minority of the
population engaging in active resistance to create
change?

There are three major explanations:

1. Disruption. Mark Lichbach speculates that few
governments could withstand a challenge from an
activated minority because of how disruptive this would
be to the status quo.4 Large-scale mobilization can tank
an economy, shut down cities and neighborhoods, and
put massive political pressure on leaders to resolve
a crisis. 3.5% may sound like a small number, but it’s a
large absolute number of participants, even in small
countries. In the U.S. today, 3.5% would be well over
11 million people. To put this in recent context, the
largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history was
the Women’s March in January 2017. That event drew
over 4 million people—between 1 and 1.6% of the U.S.
population—into active participation across hundreds of
locations.5 Double or triple the scale of the 2017 Women’s
March’s participation, and that would approach the 3.5%
threshold.

2. Public sympathy and support. If a movement can mobilize
3.5% of the population to participate, there are likely much
larger proportions of the population that sympathize with
and support the movement. Over time, such sympathy
and support can translate into growing political pressure
for the incumbent to leave office—even in autocracies—
as has happened in scores of cases in the postwar period.

3. Defections. A key pathway to success for nonviolent
movements is the ability to create defections on the
government side.6 This means that economic, business,
political, cultural, and media elites stop supporting the
status quo; they may even join the movement. This
tends to happen most often when a movement has built
a critical mass, which generates a sense of inevitability
about their success. Elites who don’t want to be left
behind begin to shift their public loyalties, and this can
lead to a cascade of defections as others follow.7