Relative Deprivation
Gurr (1970) attributes civil and revolutionary (not interstate) wars to “relative deprivation,” which he defines as a “perception of the discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities.” Value expectations are the goods and services people think their society should produce.
Value capabilities are the goods and services people think their society can produce. Revolution occurs when a feeling of unjust deprivation spreads throughout society. In effect, the theory is a group version of frustration-aggression human needs theories (Chapter 4). The idea is not new. Aristotle held that democracies and oligarchies were prone to this sort of revolution because the common people aspired to economic or political equality while the ruling elite aspired to increase their advantage. It partially underlies the liberal-conservative debate on economics in the US today.Over time, expectations and capabilities in a society can improve, remain stable, or decline independently of one another, giving 32 = 9 possible patterns. According to Gurr, three of them increase the likelihood of revolution. The first, “decremental deprivation,” occurs when group expectations remain constant but productive capabilities decline. One such case is the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian expectations did not seem to change much with the fall of communism, but the unexpected economic collapse caused considerable discontent, leading many to demand a return to communism.
The second pattern, “aspirational deprivation,” occurs when capabilities remain relatively static while expectations increase. The late twentieth century saw much of this in Africa, as reality disabused people of their naïve expectation that they automatically would become rich with the end of colonialism.
The third pattern, “progressive deprivation,” occurs when capabilities decline and expectations increase.
In the US, black income and education increased rapidly during the 1940s and 1950s, then began to decline, so that by 1960 half the gains had disappeared. That is, expectations were rising while capabilities were declining, leading to the relatively peaceful revolution of the Civil Rights movement.The difficulty of effective measurement of its two independent variables leaves the theory supported by little more than anecdotal evidence subject to alternative interpretation. GDP works reasonably well as a measure of capability in cash economies, but not in economies that include a high proportion of non-cash and black market transactions. Expectations, which vary wildly both within and across cultures, are much more difficult to measure despite several efforts to do so and to correlate results with outbreaks of revolution or civil war. There has been still less success in identifying how much of a decline in capabilities or rise in expectations must occur before unrest breaks out.
Gurr acknowledges that relative deprivation is an incomplete theory as revolutions may have other causes. One is “revolutions from above,” such as those experienced in Japan in 1868, Turkey in 1923, and Peru in 1968 (Trimberger 1978). They were independent of the masses and had nothing to do with their economic conditions. Rather, the elite overthrew the government intending to create a stable, nationalistic state. The military has carried out most such revolutions, making them difficult or impossible to distinguish from coups d’etat.
Some studies focus on the patterns that revolutions follow once they occur. Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution (1956) is a classic based on a comparison of the American, French, and Russian revolutions. Other works in this extensive genre include those that have applied quasi-experimental methods such as time series designs to identify trends and patterns common to a wide range of revolutions (Tai 1974; Caporaso & Roos 1973).