Pinckney Research Lab https://pinckneylab.netlify.app/projects.html Research on civil resistance, democratization, and political violence at the University of Texas at Dallas. quarto-1.5.57 Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Who Overturns Nonviolent Revolutions? Jonathan Pinckney, Naela Elmore, Kashmiri Medhi, Giuseppe Peressotti https://pinckneylab.netlify.app/projects/who-overturns.html

Overview

Why do organizations that participated in pro-democracy civil resistance campaigns later overturn the very democracy that they fought to achieve? In this project we seek to understand this puzzling outcome.

Methods

For this project we have created a global dataset of attempts to overturn democracy in civil resistance transitions, as well as a dataset recording the post-civil resistance campaign behavior of all organizations that the NAVCO 2.1 dataset records as having participated in a successful civil resistance campaign.

Funding

This research was supported by generous internal funding through the University of Texas at Dallas’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) and political science department special research funds (affectionately referred to as the Brunell fund).

Outputs

]]> civil resistance democratization datasets https://pinckneylab.netlify.app/projects/who-overturns.html Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Defections From Authoritarian and Backsliding Regimes Jonathan Pinckney, Naela Elmore, Giuseppe Peressotti https://pinckneylab.netlify.app/projects/defections.html

Overview

When do supporters of authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes cease to support their leaders? When do they defect? And what actions by opposition forces, civil resistance campaigns, or third party actors can motivate such changes? Defection is crucial to the logic of political change, particularly through nonviolent resistance, yet current literature lacks a unified theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the dynamics of defection. In this project we seek to build such a framework and test it trhough a variety of empirical approaches.

Research questions

  1. What structural factors precipitate defections by regime support groups from authoritarian and backsliding regimes?
  2. What strategies by civil resistance campaigns and other opposition actors increase the likelihood of defections?
  3. What explains variation in the scale and scope of defections?
  4. When do defections precipitate regime breakdown?

Methods

We are constructing a dataset measuring the compliance of key regime support groups in all authoritarian and backsliding regimes in the post-Cold War era. In later stages of the project we will be writing a series of mini case studies of defection, as well as conducting survey experiments on defection processes.

Funding

This research is possible thanks to generous support from the Horizons Project

Outputs

  • Book manuscript: Defections: The Science of Switching Sides currently in progress.
  • Scholarly article on the structural causes of defection
  • Scholarly article on movement strategies that effectively spark defection
  • Scholarly article on defection and regime breakdown
  • Series of public-facing short articles on defection in backsliding and authoritarian contexts
]]> civil resistance democratic backsliding defections datasets https://pinckneylab.netlify.app/projects/defections.html Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT