The Paradox of Explosive and Gradual Policy Change in Political Revolutionary Times

Many political revolutionary theorists have argued that political revolutionary activity occurs in a dramatic fashion resulting in explosive change in the orientation of established policy regimes resulting in radically new public policy outputs and governmental organizational structures. This research, quantitatively analyzing political revolutions that culminated in the 20 th century, confirms that short-term political revolutionary activity and the establishment of new policy regimes were few in number. Most successful political revolutionary activities along with new policy regimes were long-term while some political revolutions were not successful. The process of political revolutionary activity to overthrow established policy regimes is a complex phenomenon with political and policy change occurring across widely varying time frames.


INTRODUCTION
The interplay between revolutionary activity and a political revolution resulting in new policy regimes with radically different policy outputs and governmental organizational structures have been extensively examined in a variety of scholarly studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8].Policy outputs in this article are government actions or inaction in the form of legislation, executive orders or written mandates, and judicial decisions.A policy regime is defined as governing arrangements among a political coalition or group [9,10].In a political revolution, which may be violent or non-violent, a policy regime is overthrown resulting in the enactment of a radically new set of permanent state institutions and policies [11,12].
One issue of contention in the literature on political revolutions is the length of political revolutions.A number of scholars of political revolutions have postulated that revolutions occur as dramatic and short-term revolutionary change resulting in an explosive change in political power and political structures over a relatively short period of time [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].For instance, Skopcol wrote: Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below [32].
On the other hand, other scholars have indicated political revolutionary change and policy outputs may occur in a short period, long period, or not at all [13,14,33,34].In addition, Goldstone also has argued that whether or not and for what duration explosive, dramatic, and short-term revolutionary political change occurs is dependent on: Where the state remains strong and the opposition is anchored mainly in rural areas, one may see a drawn-out guerilla war.Where the state weakens rapidly, many elites abandon it, and urban groups actively support the opposition, one may see a fairly rapid overthrow of the central authorities [13].
Goldstone also has argued that: Efforts to change the political regime are based on competing visions of the social order; informal or formal mass mobilization; non-institutional actions including demonstrations, protests, strikes, and violence [19].
In particular, Goldstone's argues that the conditions that initiate a political revolutionary situation include a state in crisis, elites in conflict and in opposition to the state, and a large portion of the population mobilized against the state [19,35].In order to ascertain which of these competing theoretical perspectives are accurate, in this paper for all revolutions culminating in the 20 th century I will examine and analyze all political revolutionary activity resulting in new and permanent policy regimes

LITERATURE REVIEW
A variety of scholars examining political revolutionary change outside normal political processes have concluded that revolutionary political change can occur in an explosive manner in a short period [13-32, 34, 36].On the other hand, some scholars of political revolution have also defined revolutionary change as occurring in short periods, long periods, or not at all [13,14,33,34].
Initially in the early 20 th century, the first generation of revolutionary political theory was conducted by scholars of natural history [18,19,[37][38][39].Here, the focus is on theories based on collective national traits and group or mob psychology based on an unconscious, as posited by Freudian psychology, "collective mind" [18,19,38,39].People through a collective mind also initiate group actions such as revolutions.Moreover, people are quite different acting as individuals in contrast to a group or mob.A person's personality becomes submerged thus allowing the collective mind of the mob to dominate.Based on the unconscious mob mentality, passions, often irrational and exaggerated, rather than the reason of rule is the cause of political revolutions [18,19,38,39].
Beginning in the 1950s, a second generation of scholars of political revolution, following the lead of Talcott Parsons and the structural functionalist school in sociology, utilized policy equilibrium theory to explain societal functions [23][24][25][40][41][42].A central tenet of the structural functional school is a view of political policymaking systems being in equilibrium and homeostasis or disequilibrium due to shifting balances of power from political demands and conflicts between interest groups [23][24][25][40][41][42].Political systems under structural functionalism are due to a policymaking system in a holistic model based on important constituent parts.These parts included policy inputs emanating from the total social, cultural, and political environment, conversion of demands into outputs including policy implementation, and feedback [43].Cultural norms, customs, and political institutions play a primary role in influencing these separate parts in the policy process related to the whole system.Policymaking under structural functionalism often focuses on the process of how a policy is developed.When a system is in extreme disequilibrium, then a punctuated policy reform or even a political revolution can occur [17,18,44].
A third generation of scholars of political revolution introduced several new and important variables to understand political revolutions including class and class struggle, the state, international relations and conflicts between states, international capitalist economics, and rural revolts [18,19,22,26,28,32,34].The focus of this approach was on class conflict and structures.Another key feature of this approach was analyzing class revolution from below.This was manifest in studies of conflicts between peasants or workers and elites who dominated the state.Other foci of this approach was identifying various factors that initiated political revolutions including the role of international capitalist economics and the state as a basis for administrative and coercive power for domestic ruling elites and classes [18,19,22,26,28,32,34].
Goldstone and Foran have argued that since the 1980s a fourth generation of revolutionary political scholarship has emerged [18,19].This large and diverse group of scholarship has expanded upon the third generation of political revolution scholarship with a focus on the role of culture, ideology, and leaders in political revolutions [18,19].Many fourth generation political revolution scholars have also concluded that there are a wide and complex range of factors that may cause and explain why political revolutions do or do not occur and for what duration [14,18,19,33,34].Among these factors that cause political revolutions are the interconnection between state administrative, police and national security structures, ideology, culture, political elites and classes, political leadership, interest groups, mobilizations, and foreign interventions [18,19].In addition, Emirbayer and Goodwin argue that important independent factors are the transformation of a political culture including social-psychological and human agency to assess alternative course of action that converts normative views of the world [35].

SUMMARY
With respect to the time period and policy regime change caused by political revolutions, many scholars of political revolution have argued that political revolutions occur in a short period leading to explosive policy change.Some others have asserted that political revolutions may occur in a short period, long period, or not at all.This article will determine whether political revolutionary activity that attempts to overthrow a political regime are all short-term and explosive in nature leading to dramatic policy output change in the form of a new policy regime.

METHODS
The basic underlying assumptions in measuring the temporal extent of political revolutions that confront political regimes is that political revolutions are based in an "eventful sociology" where the revolutionary process is based on a variety of contingent and complex variables in an ongoing political revolution [45].What constitutes an eventful sociology can only be determined by historical analyses based on hindsight of revolutionary activity in which a new policy regime was established and not fundamentally changed.The period of 1900 to 1999 was chosen to analyze political revolutionary activity as this represents a suitably long enough recent time period and sample to ascertain trends with respect to whether or not political revolutions occurred explosively and rapidly.
Data on the time period of revolutionary activity and establishment of permanent policy regimes for this analysis was obtained from articles from major newspapers contained in LexisNexis Academic, New York Times historical archives, peer reviewed articles obtained from JSTOR, EBSCO, and WorldCat online searches, and from the comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedic history of world revolutions by Goldstone and Defronzo [12,21,46,47].
Measurement of the data from 1990 to 1999 of the eventful sociology of political revolutions will occur in two parts.First, a measurement will be conducted that includes the name of the political revolution, the year the revolution ended, the chronological period in months in which the revolution occurred, the primary groups and opponents involved, and whether the revolution was successful or not.This assessment will determine whether political revolutionary activity is ordinarily short term or not.
In order to determine whether political revolutionary activity has been rapid and explosive or not, descriptive empirical statistics were generated on the length of each successful or nonsuccessful political revolutionary activity including median, mean, and mode.The time period for each political revolutionary activity was based on the month and year the political revolutionary activity began and ended.For this paper political revolutions are considered relatively short-term if they occurred in 24 months or less.In this paper, two years was utilized as this represents a fairly short period of time while providing a period that does not underestimate short-term political revolutions.Utilizing this approach, I will then determine the nature of the tempo of revolutionary activity that culminated in the 20 th century.

RESULTS
Appendix provides an overview of each political revolution that ended in the 20 th century including the number of months of the revolution.As illustrated by Figures 1 and 2, of the 85 instances of political revolutionary activity ending in the 20 th century, 40 cases or 49 % of political revolutionary activity was short term lasting two years or less while 44 cases or 51 % of political revolutionary activity lasted two or more years and was long term.Additionally, long term revolutionary activities resulting in new policy regimes occurred in 34 out of 45 cases or 75,6 % of the time.
Additionally, with the exception of 21 instances of political revolutionary activity lasting one month or less, all other instances of political revolutionary activity randomly occurred in two instances or less per month.The shortest duration of political revolutionary activity was one month or less and the longest duration manifest in the Indian Independence Movement lasted 751 months.The mode was one month or less as 21 was the greatest number of political revolutionary activities occurring in one time period.The average number of months that political revolutionary activity occurred was 92 months while the median point for political revolutionary activity was 30 months.This indicates that while the number of short-term and long-term political revolutionary activity events were numerically divided almost evenly, the collective length of long-term political revolutionary activity skewed the overall average length and median indicating political revolutionary activity can be quite lengthy in relation to short-term political revolutionary activities.These results confirm that classifications of political revolutions as short-term and dramatic is not accurate in a large majority of cases.In addition, explosive political revolutionary activity and change in a minority of short-term cases to overthrow political regimes was unsuccessful.Finally, the nature of the tempo of political revolutions, overall, represented a complex pattern of time frames in which short and long term political activity occurred.

DISCUSSION
The basic premise of many political revolutionary theorists is that political revolutionary change occurs in a dramatic and short-term fashion.This research in the area of revolutionary political activities resulting in new policy regimes confirms that in the rare instances when violent and turbulent political revolutionary struggle occurs, most successful political revolutions establishing a new policy regime were not short-term.This description of political revolutions is in line with the arguments of Goldstone and other fourth generation political revolution scholars that political revolutions can be short-term, long-term, or not successful.Political revolutions demonstrate a complex variety of time periods.
In that regard, the study of political revolutionary activity resulting in new policy regimes and public policy outputs and governmental organizational structures needs to come into sync with the conclusion that has now been reached for quite some time by fourth generation scholars of political revolutions.That is, political revolutionary activity linked to the establishment of new policy regimes is a highly varied and even complex matter and often not short-term.Some factors such as culture, ideology, capitalism, corporate actions or the role of classes and elites may have a particularly significant role in causing policy regime changes.Ultimately, business as usual when it comes to comprehending the nature of political revolutionary activity linked to new policy regimes requires analyses that account for complex system behavior as a key feature in ascertaining the nature and scope of political revolutionary actions linked to the policy process.

Figure 1 .Figure 2 .
Figure 1.Number of short political revolutions that occurred around world in the 20 th century, by duration in months.Black bars denote successful, and grey unsuccessful political revolutions.