J-Curve Hypothesis

Background and History

In an article entitled “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” Davies sought to expound on the writings of two prominent political thinkers, Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, who offered seemingly alternative visions of the causes of collective violence. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx claimed that longlasting deprivation would lead members of underprivileged groups (such as die proletarian working class) to realize that they have “nothing to lose but their chains” and therefore rise up in a desperate attempt to better their living and working conditions. By contrast, de Tocqueville believed that overwhelming oppression only bursts into rebellion when there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Davies endeavored to integrate insights from both of these perspectives, hypothesizing that revolutions would be most likely to occur when a period of improvement is followed by a sharp worsening of circumstances.

Davies sought to illustrate the explanatory power of the J-curve hypothesis in several paradigmatic cases, including Dorr's Rebellion of 1842, in which it seemed that a period of industrial prosperity in Rhode Island was followed by an economic depression, causing an uprising against the government on the part of frustrated workers. Davies also argued that the events surrounding the Russian Revolution of 1917 adhered to the pattern predicted by the J-curve hypothesis. Until 1905, Russians had enjoyed the benefits of several decades of rapid industrial growth and greater political emancipation, before being confronted with a severe downturn in economic circumstances (due in part to war with Japan) and a return to political repression. The rapidly increasing gap between the people's subjective expectations of continued economic and political development and the objective reality of strict deprivation imposed by the czarist regime, according to Davies, led Russian workers and intellectuals to band together in the revolutionary effort that succeeded in abolishing czarism in 1917.

Soon after the publication of Davies's article in 1962, the J-curve hypothesis became one of the most (if not the most) popular of the social scientific accounts of revolutionary antecedents. The basic logic of the hypothesis was incorporated into several versions of relative deprivation theory. The central tenet of relative deprivation theory, shared by proponents of the J-curve hypothesis, is that collective frustration results from the failure to meet subjective rather than objective standards. However, relative deprivation theorists have offered significantly more complicated explanations of political violence arising from the frustration that is believed to accompany the sudden thwarting of rising expectations.

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