Encouraging Revolution

I'm curious what criteria have to be met before a government will be overthrown in favor of an influential ideology.

I've got tons of tourism and way more happiness than the other civs I'm trying to influence, but they just won't budge.

It's a weird game. Even though I had an early lead in the ideology race and made Freedom super attractive with my charming utopic society, almost everybody picked order and autocracy and they've resisted the pull of my superior culture. It's really weird.

So what tips the scales? Is there a certain unhappiness level civs have to reach before their people revolt?

The AI gets a lot of powerful happiness bonuses. I've had times where I'm Influential over another civ with a different ideology and they are losing like -24 happiness to my pressure, yet they still have +10 happiness. There's a luck factor involved.

You can't really force an AI (on your own). Even if they're deeply in unhappiness they'll often times not change their ideology. The problem seems to be that they'd lose all the additional happiness from their ideology and would actually drop even deeper into unhappiness temporarely so they just accept it and do nothing. Also, the unhappiness a Civ can bring to other Civs is capped (once you're fully influential, it won't get any worse), so as long as there aren't a lot of other Civs spreading your ideology and adding additional unhappiness, then there's really no reason for them so swap.

Ryika said:

You can't really force an AI (on your own). Even if they're deeply in unhappiness they'll often times not change their ideology. The problem seems to be that they'd lose all the additional happiness from their ideology and would actually drop even deeper into unhappiness temporarely so they just accept it and do nothing. Also, the unhappiness a Civ can bring to other Civs is capped (once you're fully influential, it won't get any worse), so as long as there aren't a lot of other Civs spreading your ideology and adding additional unhappiness, then there's really no reason for them so swap.

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Ah, man, I've been trying to push the world into freedom for like 100 turns (okay, probably not that long) and now you're telling me it's never going to happen? Well, crap.

You need an AI which has the same ideology as you. Alone, I never saw an AI flip for my ideology. Many time a city revolt but that's all.
I saw revolution when an AI with good culture and tourism choose my ideology.

Autocracy or Order can be very hard to flip as they get so much free happiness from buildings like Monuments, Barracks etc. On the higher difficulties its very rare to see this happen as the AIs cheat a lot.

The only other thing I can think of is try to deny them archaeology sites (dig up there relics so they can't get landmark bonuses) and try to deny the AI happiness wonders like Notre Dame, Chichen Itza, Forbidden Palace & Neuscwanstein.
I'm not sure but what about pushing your ideology through the World Council?.

You can't force the AI to change ideology it can only chose to like you. If it doesn't revolt then it will never revolt. Usually I mass gift captured cities to the civ I wish to flip and it's either successful on the next turn or not.