The 3.5% rule is a data-based concept that basically says when 3.5% of the population of a country shows up and peacefully/nonviolently protests against the government, then that government is likely to fall. This rule was formulated by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School who spent years building the largest dataset in the world on how authoritarian regimes fall. She analyzed over 300 resistance movements from 1900-2006 and found that nonviolent efforts (versus violent ones) were more successful, and those that mobilized over 3.5% of the population succeeded.

Historical examples of this phenomenon include Poland, with Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Movement defeating the communist government in 1989. This inspired democratic movements in Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Chenoweth published Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict in 2011 with co-author Maria Stephan. They found that successful nonviolent resistance requires a diverse group of participants with sustained actions over time to withstand direct repression. Other important factors include momentum, organization, and strategic leadership. The national Indivisible group , which was founded in 2016, embraces many of these basic principles.

With other scholars, Chenoweth formed the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), which documents protests and demonstrations in the U.S. to measure the effectiveness of civil resistance by evaluating public sentiment, social movement energy, and regional political dynamics. The CCC first started counting demonstrations and crowd sizes in January 2017, and included the Women’s March in 2017 and the George Floyd protests in 2020.

In the U.S., since people started protesting the autocratic second term of Trump, the protest numbers have continued to increase and are nearing the 3.5% threshold. The No Kings protests have grown from 4 million in June 2025 (NK1), to 7 million in October 2025 (NK2), and over 8 million in March 2026 (NK3). With the current U.S. population at approximately 346 million, we would need to see about 12 million people out protesting to reach 3.5% of the population. The lesson is that we need to continue to grow as an organized, diversified, peaceful resistance movement to effect change and get our democracy back under control in accordance with our Constitution.