• woodrow wilson center
  • ecsp

New Security Beat

Subscribe:
  • mail-to
  • Who We Are
  • Topics
    • Population
    • Environment
    • Security
    • Health
    • Development
  • Columns
    • China Environment Forum
    • Choke Point
    • Dot-Mom
    • Navigating the Poles
    • New Security Broadcast
    • Reading Radar
  • Multimedia
    • Water Stories (Podcast Series)
    • Backdraft (Podcast Series)
    • Tracking the Energy Titans (Interactive)
  • Films
    • Water, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Animated Short)
    • Paving the Way (Ethiopia)
    • Broken Landscape (India)
    • Scaling the Mountain (Nepal)
    • Healthy People, Healthy Environment (Tanzania)
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Contact Us

NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Tunisia’s Shot at Democracy: What Demographics and Recent History Tell Us

    January 25, 2011 By Richard Cincotta

    While events in Tunisia, beginning mid-December and leading ultimately to President Ben Ali’s departure within a month, have rocked the Arab world, they leave an open question: Will Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” ultimately lead to the Arab world’s first liberal democracy? [Video Below]

    If the relationship between demographic change and democratic liberalization remains as robust as it has over the past 40 years, the odds are in Tunisia’s favor. South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Indonesia, and Brazil were at a similar stage of age-structural maturity when each ascended to liberal democracy. If this political-demographic rule functions similarly in North Africa (see age-structural predictions for North Africa in a prior ECSP publication), then the likelihood of Tunisia achieving a liberal democracy – that is, a state assessed as “free” in Freedom House’s annual assessment – is high, relative to countries in other parts of the Arab world.

    According to Freedom House, a free country is one “where there is open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties, significant independent civic life, and independent media.” On a scale of one to seven, seven being the most autocratic, Ben Ali’s regime scored a 6.0 (assessed in 2010).

    The Demographic Factor

    Is it possible that a single factor could communicate so much about a nation’s future? In fact, a country’s age structure (the distribution of the population by age) is anything but a single factor. It is, instead, somewhat like a running tally of age-specific variations that have been produced by an array of factors influencing birth, death, and migration over the length of a human lifespan. Many of these factors – including family size, educational attainment, income, workforce growth, and the ratio of dependents to workers – critically influence the path of human development and mediate progress toward a functional, modern state. Moreover, each factor affects the others in complex ways.

    How long could it take Tunisia to move from Freedom House’s “not free” category (7.0 to 5.5) to “free” (2.5 to 1.0)? South Korea ascended in five years (1983-88). For Indonesia, the same journey took eight years (1997-2005), and for Taiwan, it took over 15 years to inch through the partly free category to free (1980 to 1995). Recent European ascents were somewhat quicker: Poland took four years (1987-91); Romania, six (1990-96); Portugal, three (1973-76); and Spain, four (1973-77). Greece jumped from not free to free in only one year (1973-74), following the collapse of a repressive anti-communist military regime.

    To understand how age structure can directly influence a state’s chances of attaining and maintaining liberal democracy requires a discussion of two models of sociopolitical behavior: (1) the Hobbesian bargain and (2) the youth bulge thesis.

    Assuming, as the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes did in the middle of the 17th century, that citizens are willing to relinquish political liberties when faced with threats to their security and property (the Hobbesian bargain), it is not surprising that support for authoritarian regimes – especially among commercial and military elites – appears high when societies are very youthful and prone to political violence (the youth bulge thesis). When fertility declines, the population’s bulge of young adults ultimately dissipates over time. With much of society’s political volatility depleted, authoritarian executives tend to lose the support of the commercial elite, who find the regime’s grip on communication and commerce economically stifling and the privileges granted to family members and cronies of the political elite financially debilitating.

    Good News, Bad News

    What does this mean for Tunisia? First, the good news: Despite journalists’ focus on youth in the streets, Tunisia is not a youth-bulge country. Its population’s median age is 29 years – exceedingly more mature than the populations of most states in the Arab Middle East, such as Yemen (median age of 18 years), the Palestinian Territories (18 years), Iraq (19), Syria (23), and Jordan (23). Tunisia’s consistent declines in fertility pushed it into the class of intermediate age structures in 2005.

    Intermediate age structures (also known as “early worker-bulge” populations) are distinguished by having a median age between 25 and 35 years. In its most recent report, Freedom House assesses about half of these states – which include Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, and Turkey – as free; the other half are partly free or not free. According to the UN Population Division’s database, several countries in the Arab Gulf region – Kuwait (partly free), Qatar, and Bahrain (not free) – also have age structures that fit into this “intermediate” classification. But this is misleading; the Gulf states’ median ages are inflated by the presence of large numbers of temporary labor migrants in the prime working ages. Tunisia and Lebanon share the distinction of having the eldest native populations in the Arab world. Better yet, Tunisia does not suffer Lebanon’s difficulties with internal (Hezbollah) and external (Syria, Israel, and Iran) actors.

    How did Tunisia get ahead? New York Times correspondent David Kirkpatrick said it so well, that I’ll simply quote his statement about Habib Bourguiba, the country’s first president and the father of its broad middle class:

    [Bourguiba] pushed a social agenda of secularization, women’s rights, birth control and family planning that, in contrast to most countries in the region, slowed population growth, keeping the job of public education and social welfare manageable.

    Bourguiba’s reforms reshaped the country’s pyramidal population age structure into the intermediate structure that Tunisians experience today (see figure above).

    Now for the bad news: Tunisia’s ascent to liberal democracy is still uncertain. In the annals of history, nearly all of the youth-led revolts aimed at achieving liberal democracy have fallen far short of their mark. Instead, they tend to descend into infighting and typically produce a partial-democratic or autocratic regime capable of quelling violence and limiting the destruction of property. This tendency lays bare the most serious limitation of an age-structural theory of democratization: ultimately, personalities and political action – non-demographic factors – are needed to consolidate elite and popular support for a liberal democratic regime. To eventually attain liberal democracy, Tunisia’s political elite, or what remains of them after years of expulsion and political exclusion under the Ben Ali regime, must seize the democratic initiative from demonstrators and make it their own.

    But wait a minute, you might say: Wasn’t the Jasmine Revolution triggered by Mohamed Bouaziz’s martyrdom and a series of Wikileaks highlighting the Ben Ali regime’s nepotism and corruption? In “real time” these were instrumental – and so were the internet and news media that delivered them into households in all corners of Tunisia and throughout the Arab world. But triggers like these are often unique and nearly always unpredictable. As such, they offer little assistance to serious analysts hoping to predict the timing and success of future democratic transitions. Instead, they are the grist for today’s journalism and tomorrow’s history.

    What’s Next?

    While some democracy pundits are gloomy about the country’s prospects, political demography’s age structure model gives Tunisians a good chance – perhaps even within five years – of achieving the Arab world’s first liberal democracy. Right now, the evolution of Tunisia’s political future depends on how its military, political, and commercial elites handle this opportunity. In the United States, some analysts worry that open political debate, free and fair elections, and rule of law might ultimately end up delivering another government into the hands of Islamists, a group that tends to make gains in the wake of corruption, and one that Ben Ali actively suppressed. This may be a moot point: There are many in U.S. foreign policy circles who are convinced that the Arab world needs a liberal democracy much more than Washington needs another friend.

    For now, those outside Tunisia can only watch and wait. But if you’re watching, do some political demography of your own: Demonstrations that feature young women, the middle-aged, and perhaps even entire families, are a sign that democracy is on its way. Crowds entirely dominated by young men and boys – the social remnant of Tunisia’s waning youth bulge – tell a different story.

    Richard Cincotta is a consulting political demographer for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Project and demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center.

    Sources: Canadian Press, CIA World Factbook, Freedom House, The New York Times, U.S. Census Bureau, UN Population Division.

    Photo Credit: “077,” courtesy of flickr user Nasser Nouri, and maps courtesy of Richard Cincotta and the UN Population Division.

    Topics: democracy and governance, demography, featured, Middle East, population, security, Tunisia, video, youth
    • http://www.populationaction.org Elizabeth Leahy Madsen

      Rich, thanks very much for this post. I've been eagerly awaiting your analysis of age structure and democratization as it applies to Tunisia.

      I have two questions. First, have you shifted to a new definition of age structures (intermediate, etc.,) based on median population age? In the past, you and other demographic security researchers have measured age structure as the relative proportion of different age groups within the population, either the total population, total adult population or working-age population. Why did you select median population age for this analysis? A quick review of the figures available on the UN Population Division's website shows that the relative size of the 15-24 age group within Tunisia's total population has been vacillating within the range of 19-21 percent since 1975. In 2005, that "youth bulge" was 21 percent, the highest since 1980, but there has been a rapid decline to 19 percent by 2010.

      As you say, no matter how age structure is measured, Tunisia is much further through the demographic transition than other countries in the Arab world. I would like to see this highlighted more in media coverage of the revolution, particularly in accounts of similar attempts to provoke uprisings that have taken place in Algeria, Egypt and Yemen in recent weeks. From a demographic perspective, those attempts are less likely to achieve success (except possibly in Algeria, based on your map).

      My second question is for further elaboration of the steps that lead from a dissipating youth bulge to a greater likelihood of attaining democracy (leaving aside the also-difficult question of sustainability). If I understand your descriptions of the mechanisms at work, in an authoritarian regime with a youth bulge, the government is able to keep its hold on power because the presence of a youth bulge either creates volatility or the threat of volatility in the eyes of the commercial elites whose support is critical to the regime. Does this support exist even in situations where volatility is rare, in which case the large youthful population is manipulated or whitewashed by the regime as a threat to stability? Then, as the age structure matures and becomes less youthful, the regime can no longer invoke youth (directly or indirectly) as a danger, and therefore support for the regime from the elites erodes? You don't specifically mention economic conditions in Tunisia apart from Ben Ali's resource hoarding, but issues such as unemployment rates have been frequently highlighted in media accounts of the revolution. In addition to the unpredictable triggers such as the self-immolation in Tunisia’s case, do deeper-seated structural problems such as high unemployment and/or rampant corruption have to be extant to provoke revolution in an authoritarian context or is the dissolution of a youthful age structure combined with an unpredictable trigger sufficient?

    • Jack A. Goldstone

      Richard's insights into Tunisia's prospects for democracy are terrific and I agree with him. However, in regard to the causes of the rebellion,I have to disagree with him in one respect – Tunisia in 2010 is VERY MUCH a YOUTH BULGE country, at least as far as political theory would see it. As Henrik Urdal has shown, youth bulge should NOT be measured as the size of the youth cohort (15-24) against the entire population, but as the fraction of youth in the adult population, those aged 15 and older. The 0-14 group is politically not relevant, and should not be counted in assessing the impact of youth cohorts on the total population's political mobilization potential.
      For Tunisia, median age may in fact be misleading (as I didn't realize until I looked at the age pyramids that Richard has posted above). Because birth rates fell very very rapidly after 1995, median age in 2010 is intermediate; but if you look only at the population aged 15 and up, you still see very large cohorts of youth compared to total adults.
      Because Tunisia's birth rate only started falling sharply after 1995, the large cohorts born in 1986-1995, now age 15-24, still make up a VERY large portion (33%) of all adults. While the next cohorts are much smaller, so this 'youth bulge' will soon fade, it is still very much present, as Richard's graphs show.
      There is no 'automatic' link between a certain age structure and political rebellion, but the COMBINATION of a large youth bulge AND economic frustration among youth IS a potent force for political instability. That combination is certainly one feature of Tunisia in 2010, although the extreme corruption of the Ben Ali regime and his family was a galling and critical factor in the widespread rejection of his regime.
      That points to another bit of misleading data. Many (including me) assumed that because Tunisia's recent economic growth was strong, at 5% per year, economic grievances could not be so widespread. But that is wrong, because we did not appreciate how much of that growth has been grabbed by Ben Ali's family (which according to one account had ownership interests in half the businesses in the country)and cronies. Substantial growth from which many have been excluded — especially youth — is in fact a reason for widespread grievances, and that was another key factor behind the mass protests.
      — Jack A. Goldstone, George Mason University

    • http://thefuturefacesofwar.blogspot.com Jennifer Sciubba, Rhodes College

      Like Jack and Liz note, using median age helps us understand Tunisia’s progress along the demographic transition, but it doesn’t really help us understand the protests in Tunisia or in other countries across the “arc of revolution.” Median age obscures the individual experiences of young adults who are putting their lives at risk to speak out in protest, or setting themselves on fire in desperation. As Jack points out, from a theoretical point of view, Tunisia is very much experiencing cohort crowding—whether we call it “youth bulge” or “early worker bulge” the outcome is the same. To say that Tunisia is not a youth bulge country misses the point.
      Part of the reason we political demographers buy into the link between youth bulge and conflict is the idea of cohort crowding. As Richard Easterlin points out, a cohort’s economic and social prospects tend to have an inverse relationship to the cohort’s size relative to those around it, other things being constant. In Tunisia’s case, those between ages 25-35 are part of a larger cohort than those preceding ones so they are “crowded” out of the labor market and will tend to have lower relative income compared to preceding generations, which are smaller. As I note in my book, one study of Tunisians looking for work reported that young adults felt crowded out of benefits in the family, school, and labor markets. In particular, according to a study by M. Bedoui and G. Ridha, “family and marital problems were common. They became poorer, lost confidence, and became fatalistic and submissive. Over the long run the majority saw unemployment as a source of disequilibrium, humiliation, and even oppression.” (in Hilary Silver, “Social Exclusion: Comparative Analysis of Europe and Middle East Youth,” Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper p. 30.) That quotation seems eerily prescient in Tunisia’s case. Mohamed Bouazizi certainly seemed to succumb to fatalism and the protests started as economic but quickly moved to political. Political, social, and economic marginalization are connected. While there is some diversity in age structure across the Middle East, the populations of those aged 15-24 in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria and Iran, which experienced youth protests in 2009, are all between 27 and 34 percent of all adults ages 15-59, with Lebanon and Tunisia at the lower end of the spectrum and Egypt and Jordan at the higher. As we can see from the population pyramid of each of these states, there is a clear population bulge at these ages.
      We also have to think about the cohort effect. The cohort effect describes shared historical experiences of particular age groups. Across the “arc of revolution”, young adults are plugged into Facebook, Twitter, and other internet forums to share experiences of marginalization and revolution. This likely informs their choice of whether or not to speak out.

    • Jack A. Goldstone

      Let me offer just a few clarifications:

      My original statement that one-third of Tunisia's young adults are 15-24 was a misstatement, based on older data. Using more recent and detailed 2010 data from the United Nations, the accurate figure is that only 25.7% of all adult males (15 and up) are aged 15-24; but fully 38.5% of all adult males are aged 15-29. The difference is because the cohort aged 24-29 remains one of the largest in Tunisia's population.
      In a country like Tunisia in which fertility has been dropping rapidly but only for the last 15 years, the median age will be dropping to lower levels while the youth bulge remains high, if only for a decade or so. So Cincotta may have misstated the situation in Tunisia today slightly by suggesting, based only on median age, that it is "not a youth-bulge country." Any society where a quarter of all adults are under 25 and nearly 40% of all adults are under 30 years old still has a considerable youth bulge, or as Scubbia describes it, cohort crowding, and has substantial potential for mass mobilization and instability. But at the same time, Tunisia is near the borderline for such conditions to place a country at high risk — once the under-25 youth bulge drops to 20% of all adults, the risks of instability are much lower. Cincotta is correct to note that Tunisia, given the sharp downward trend in median age, is rapidly becoming less youthful, and that the odds of it making a successful transition to democracy are, if not great, at least reasonable (50-50) and likely to improve considerably in just the next 5 years, as the last large youth cohorts are replaced by smaller youth cohorts.

      Many have pointed out that Tunisia was among the least likely of all Arab countries to revolt in several ways — it is not as young, it has had greater economic success, and had a more restrictive state, than most other Arab countries. All that is true. But its regime had deteriorated into a terribly corrupt, family-based regime that had begun to repel even its own business, professional, and military elite through the rapacity and coarseness of its greed and repression. When you combine these factors with huge investments in education in a still-large youth cohort, and the stifling effect of corruption on job market entry so that unemployment and underemployment among the young was over 25%, you have conditions for a major uprising and a rapid desertion of the Ben Ali family.
      Egypt was actually similar to Tunisia in many ways, but with an even larger youth cohort. So while Tunisia's initial eruption may be a surprise, Egypt's following suit should not be. As to whether other Arab countries will also follow, we can note that most Arab countries have population profiles much like Egypt or even younger, and have leaders that are also seen as corrupt. So we can say that all these countries are at substantial risk, even if we cannot predict exactly where the military and security forces will desert their regimes. China had a 15-24/all adults youth bulge of 33% in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square revolt; but the authorities were able to use the military to quell even that very large protest.
      Perhaps more important are the implications of Cincotta's age-structure analysis for the prospects for stable democracy. These are at least partly hopeful for Tunisia, but frankly not very hopeful for most other Arab nations. That is worrisome indeed.

      Jack A. Goldstone

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/10648727700659999180 Schuyler Null

      Thanks for all the great comments, Richard has responded with further elaboration on his method and Tunisia in particular here: "More on Tunisia’s Age Structure, its Measurement, and the Knowledge Derived."

Join the Conversation

  • RSS
  • subscribe
  • facebook
  • G+
  • twitter
  • iTunes
  • podomatic
  • youtube
Tweets by NewSecurityBeat

Trending Stories

  • unfccclogo1
  • Pop at COP: Population and Family Planning at the UN Climate Negotiations

Featured Media

Backdraft Podcast

play Backdraft
Podcasts

More »

What You're Saying

  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: "Feminism materializes through investment in human capital and caregiving sectors of the economy...
  • 49890944808_c7d6dfef74_c Why Feminism Is Good for Your Health
    Melinda Cadwallader: People who refuse to acknowledge patriarchy are often the ones who benefit from it. So please, say...
  • Water desalination pipes A Tale of Two Coastlines: Desalination in China and California
    Dr S Sundaramoorthy: It is all fine as theory. What about the energy cost? Arabian Gulf has the money from its own oil....

Related Stories

No related stories.

  • woodrow
  • ecsp
  • RSS Feed
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Wilson Center
  • Contact Us
  • Print Friendly Page

© Copyright 2007-2023. Environmental Change and Security Program.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. All rights reserved.

Developed by Vico Rock Media

Environmental Change and Security Program

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center

  • One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
  • 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
  • Washington, DC 20004-3027

T 202-691-4000