With age comes wisdom: Campaign duration and the countervailing effects of participant diversity

Under what conditions does participant diversity improve anti-government campaign success? While diversity can enhance recruitment, innovation, and legitimacy, it may also increase internal conflict due to coordination challenges, making its overall impact uncertain. We propose that time resolves this tension in diversity’s countervailing effects. Diverse campaigns require sustained interaction to consolidate shared identity, develop organizational capacity, and improve decision-making processes through trust-building and actor filtering. Analyzing NAVCO 2.1 data on anti-government campaigns between 1945 and 2013, we find that diversity is associated with competing dynamics that typically offset each other. While diverse participation increases campaigns’ likelihood of achieving intermediate progress, it simultaneously raises the risk of internal conflict, which reduces the probability of ultimate success. However, campaign duration moderates these effects: in longer campaigns, diversity’s conflict-inducing effects diminish while its strategic benefits become more pronounced. Our results show that these temporal effects emerge gradually as campaigns mature over several years. These findings highlight how temporal dynamics shape when diversity becomes a strategic asset rather than a coordination burden for collective action.