A note of caution about the 3.5% rule that has received a lot of focus in recent years:

People will, of course, find reasons to explain away why one or the other of the protest movements don’t count – but what’s important is that both show there is nothing magical about a 3.5% threshold, even in exactly the context to which it was originally applied.

The animating theory of modern protest, then, has been extended well out of the context of its original research, and doesn’t hold up even in its original context when we look at the biggest non-violent protest movements of the last decade. And yet this goes entirely unexamined.