A Tale of Two Methods

It is striking that those works on the subject of revolutions that have had lasting influence have been almost exclusively built around comparative case studies. From Crane Brinton's (1938) The Anatomy of Revolution to Barrington Moore Jr.'s (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy to Theda Skocpol's (1979) States and Social Revolutions, this pattern holds true. Even books with widely divergent theoretical perspectives, such as Samuel Huntington's (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies, Chalmers Johnson's (1966) Revolutionary Change, and Ted Robert Gurr's (1970) Why Men Rebel build their arguments around series of brief analytic case accounts, rather than efforts at statistical analysis of large data sets.

This is not because such data sets do not exist. Although it is sometimes argued that revolutions – particularly great social revolutions, such as those of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917 – are too few for formal data analysis, this seems to exaggerate the truth. Jeff Goodwin (2001) lists no fewer than eighteen “major social revolutions” (presumably the most restrictive category of revolutions) from France in 1789 to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. John Foran (1997a), using only a slightly less restrictive definition, lists thirty-one revolutions occurring merely in the Third World since 1900. If we extend the definition to cover not only revolutions but also revolutionary movements, the Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (Goldstone 1998c) lists over 150 cases around the world since the sixteenth century.