LIFE BEGINS AFTER 25: DEMOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIETAL TIMING OF THE ARAB SPRING

From FPRI:

LIFE BEGINS AFTER 25:
DEMOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIETAL TIMING OF THE ARAB SPRING
by Richard Cincotta

January 23, 2012

Dr. Richard Cincotta is a political demographer whose
research focuses on the demographic transition and human
migration, and their relationships to political, economic,
and environmental change. His publications on these topics
have appeared in Foreign Policy, Nature, and Science
magazines. He contributed to the National Intelligence
Council's most recent global futuring exercise, Global
Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2009) and The Geneva
Declaration Secretariat's Global Burden of Armed Violence
(2008).

Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2012/201201.cincotta.demography_arabspring.html 

                  LIFE BEGINS AFTER 25:
  DEMOGRAPHY AND THE SOCIETAL TIMING OF THE ARAB SPRING

                    by Richard Cincotta

Much has been written about the circumstances that led
Middle East experts to be blindsided by the successful
series of popular demonstrations that kicked off the Arab
Spring in December 2010. Writing in Foreign Affairs,
political scientist Gregory Gausse recounts how regional
specialists, like himself, overestimated the strength and
cohesiveness of North Africa's autocracies, as well as the
depth of personal allegiances available to these
authoritarians among their military's highest ranks.[1]
Another article in the same journal, by Nassim Taleb and
Mark Blyth, draws a strikingly dissimilar conclusion from
political science's most recent failure.[2] They describe
North Africa's dramatic political events as a "black swan"-
the unpredictable terminus of a buildup of tensions brought
to a head by complexly interacting forces.

Little, if any, mention has been made, however, of an
article describing the relationship between demography and
democracy ("How Democracies Grow Up") that was printed on
the pages of Foreign Policy in March of 2008[3]- more than
two-and-a-half years before pro-democracy demonstrators took
to the streets in Tunisia. In that essay, I describe a
simple model driven by population age structure (the
distribution of population by age) that can be used to
statistically forecast democratization, with reasonable
success. Based on that research, I reached the following
conclusion:

  "The first (and perhaps most surprising) region that
  promises a shift to liberal democracy is a cluster along
  Africa's Mediterranean coast: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia,
  Libya, and Egypt, none of which has experienced liberal
  democracy in the recent past. The other is in South
  America: Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, each of which
  attained liberal democracy demographically "early" but
  was unable to sustain it. Interpreting these forecasts
  conservatively, we can expect there will be one, maybe
  two, in each group that will become stable liberal
  democracies by 2020."  [Foreign Policy, March, 2008, pp.
  81-83]

That forecast appeared again in print in 2009 ("Half a
Chance: Youth Bulges and Transitions to Liberal Democracy"),
in the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and
Security Report the following year,[4] and is detailed in
Political Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping
Security and National Politics, edited by Jack Goldstone,
Monica Duffy Toft and Eric Kaufmann  (launched at FPRI on
December 13, 2011).[5]

Of course, the forecast of "one, maybe two," North African
liberal democracies has yet to be realized. Nonetheless, the
first step toward democratization, the ouster of the
authoritarian head of state, is a fait accompli in three of
the region's states-in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. And,
despite tensions that will likely arise between the Nahda,
Tunisia's Islamist party, and the secular center and left-
wing parties, the country's Jasmine Revolution remains, for
the time being, well on track.

Was this forecast for North Africa a lucky guess? Or did it
make use of information that was unavailable to regional
specialists? The answer to both questions is "no-not at
all." The forecast is one of several recent products of
unclassified research in political demography that has been
funded by the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council over the
past six years. The methodologies that were developed during
this effort are repeatable and draw on the UN Population
Division's biennially revised demographic data, which can
freely be downloaded from the Internet or purchased in its
entirety.

One other important point: During 2008, I presented these
forecasts, on two separate occasions, to assembled groups of
senior Middle East scholars. On both occasions, those
present-almost to a person-strongly rejected the possibility
of political change among North African regimes (in one
case, senior experts broke into laughter at the mention of
the possibility of regime change in Tunisia).

OF BULGES AND BARGAINS
My research (with co-author John Doces) on the demographic
timing and stability of liberal democracy uses a rather
straightforward "age-structural model" to produce
statistical forecasts. In turn, that model rests on two
basic theories that predict the general behavior of states.
The first theory, the youth bulge thesis-developed over the
past four decades through the successive efforts of Herbert
M”ller,[6] Jack Goldstone,[7] Christian Mesquida,[8] Henrik
Urdal,[9] and others[10]-asserts that states with youthful
age structures face an elevated risk of experiencing armed
intra-state conflict and other types of political violence.

The second basic theory, the authoritarian bargain thesis,
harkens to a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old observation of
the English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Writing in
the 17th century, Hobbes argued that polities are born of a
trade-off: when threatened, elites and citizens willingly
trade their political and civil liberties for guarantees of
security.[11] Combining the two theories generates an
expectation that is easy to test: one would expect countries
with youthful age structures to encounter the lowest risk of
liberal democracy ("free" in the same survey). Indeed,
statistically, they do.

Is this "authoritarian bargain" reversible? In other words,
when the demographic source of insecurity fades-in this
case, when declining fertility transforms a politically
volatile, youthful population into a more age-structurally
mature populace-will elites and common citizens rally to
recoup their political and civil liberties? Statistically,
it appears that they will; as fertility declines and median
age advances, the probability that Freedom House will assess
a state as "free" increases.

In fact, this pattern of "regime timing" has remained
remarkably stable since the early 1970s, when Freedom House
first began its global surveys (see Figure 1 
http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2012/201201.cincotta.demography_arabspring.html).
In each decade since then, only about 10 percent of all countries
with a median age less than 25 years have been categorized
as "free". Moreover, that youthful-yet-liberal 10 percent
is, by and large, a highly unstable group of democracies.
Since Freedom House started keeping score, few have kept
their high rating much more than a decade. Most have been
rocked by electoral violence or an insurgency, and then
slipped to "partly free" (partial democracy) within the five
years. Others have spiraled quickly downward to "not free"
(autocracy) in the wake of a coup d'‚tat.

COMING OF AGE
For a modern state, a median age of 25 years appears as a
milestone. Around that benchmark (more or less), the
incidence of civil conflict declines perceptibly, and the
chance of being a liberal democracy increases markedly.  For
the past four decades, Freedom House has assessed about half
of all countries in the 25-to-35-year median-age range as
"free". Much of this political liberalization appears to be
related to the newfound stability of "intermediate-aged"
liberal democracies.[12] Unlike states with more youthful
populations, those assessed as "free" in this demographic
range-particularly in the 30-to-35-year range-tend to hold
onto their high ratings.

The next 10-year quartile looks even better. Since the early
1970s, Freedom House has bestowed its "free" rating on about
90 percent of all countries in the 35-to-45-year median-age
range (mature age structures). Clearly, the advance of age-
structural maturity-and the societal transformations that go
hand and hand with this transition-are tough on illiberal
regimes. And that should make analysts curious about the
identity of the remaining (and very resilient) 10 percent.

This hardy lot of illiberal survivors in the mature category
fits into three overlapping categories. The first includes
regimes led by a charismatic founder figure-like Fidel
Castro and Lee Kwan Yew; and perhaps a founder-like-figure,
Vladimir Putin (who appears to be losing his charm). The
second category comprises regimes ruling one-party states,
where party and state are synonymous and where the regime
has reconstructed its own military and commercial elites.
The most obvious example was the Soviet Union (for a while).
No doubt China, which crosses the 35-year median age mark in
the next five years, will continue to function as an
autocracy. The final category is composed of regimes that
are beholden to a militarily superior, autocratic neighbor,
intolerant of the rise of a liberal regime in its sphere of
influence-the situation of Eastern Europe during the Cold
War.

FORECASTING, WHEN OTHERS CAN'T
How did these findings lead to my 2008 forecast of political
change in North Africa? According to UN projections, between
2010 and 2019, each of the region's five coastal states were
due to reach the 25-to-35-year median-age range-a span
within which around 50 percent of all countries are, quite
consistently, liberal democracies. Assuming that the age-
structural model was as applicable to North Africa as
elsewhere, the calculated probability that, by 2020, no
country in the region would be assessed as a liberal
democracy turned out to be extremely low, around 3
percent-much more like a "safe bet" than one of Taleb's and
Blythe's black swans.

Gausse's assessment of Middle East experts' analytical
lapses is much less easy to dismiss. Moreover, that
assessment should perplex policymakers who rely on regional
and country expertise for conceptual insights and warnings.
Gausse concedes that an entire field of seasoned regional
and country specialists, some of whom are native to the
region itself, missed or mis-assessed critical shifts in
relationships among elites-the very focus of their pre-Arab
Spring narrative.

Given these circumstances, I see only one possibility: The
methodologies upon which these analysts relied-their sources
of evidence and the theories that used this evidence to
generate conclusions-are inadequate for sensing the rapid
onset of dramatic political change. If the case of the Arab
Spring seems anecdotal, then one needs only to revisit those
narratives that dominated the foreign affairs literature
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the rise of
liberal democracy in East Asia (particularly Indonesia), and
before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Few experts perceived
the impending onset of those dramatic political reversals.

Would political demography have saved the day in all cases?
Maybe not-but the development of, and openness to,
repeatable and testable means of tracking long-term trends
within those societies, as well as among elites, may have
questioned the prevailing assumptions of political stasis
that led policymakers astray. The disciplines that
contribute to international relations analysis frequently
miss dramatic changes, and then have a nasty habit of
encouraging a field day of convenient, untestable a
posteriori explanations. After interest in these has waned,
those who have erred most often move on without revisions to
the questionable methods and erroneous assumptions that
produced failure. Thus, no one, and no theory, ever
loses-except foreign affairs policymakers, who need and
deserve a better understanding of the political future.

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Notes

[1] Gause III, F. Gregory, "Why Middle East Studies Missed
the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability,"
Foreign Affairs 90, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 81-90.

[2] Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth, "The Black Swan of
Cairo: How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less
Predictable and More Dangerous," Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3
(May/June 2011): 33-39.

[3] Richard P. Cincotta, "How Democracies Grow Up: Countries
with Too Many Young People May Not Have a Fighting Chance
for Freedom," Foreign Policy, no. 165 (2008): 80-82.

[4] Richard P. Cincotta, "Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and
Transitions to Liberal Democracy," Environmental Change and
Security Project Report, no. 13 (2008/09): 10-18.

[5] Richard P. Cincotta and John Doces, "The Age-Structural
Maturity Thesis: The Youth Bulge's Influence on the Advent
and Stability of Liberal Democracy," in Political
Demography: How Population Changes Are Reshaping Security
and National Politics, ed. Jack A. Goldstone, Eric Kaufmann
and Monica Duffy Toft (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-
MacMillan, 2011), 98-116

[6] Herbert M”ller, "Youth as a Force in the Modern World,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History 10, no. 3
(1968/69): 237-60.  

[7] Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early
Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991).

[8] Christian G. Mesquida and Neil I. Wiener, "Human
Collective Aggression: A Behavioral Ecology Perspective,"
Ethology and Sociobiology 17 (1996): 247-62.

[9] Henrik Urdal, "A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and
Political Violence," International Studies Quarterly 50
(2006): 607-29.

[10] Richard P. Cincotta and Elizabeth Leahy, "Population
Age Structure and Its Relation to Civil Conflict: A Metric,"
Environmental Change and Security Project Report 12
(2006/07): 55-58; Elizabeth Leahy, Robert Engelman, Carolyn
Gibb Vogel, Sarah Haddock, and Todd Preston, The Shape of
Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More
Equitable World (Washington, DC: Population Action
International, 2007).

[11] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: With Selected Variants from
the Latin Edition of 1658, ed. Edwin M. Curley
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994 - originals 1651/1658).

[12] Richard P. Cincotta and John Doces, "The Age-Structural
Maturity Thesis: The Youth Bulge's Influence on the Advent
and Stability of Liberal Democracy."

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