“You can look into the future a couple decades and get a very good idea about where countries are going,” said Richard Cincotta during a presentation at the National Defense University last summer – at least when it comes to demography.

Cincotta, who is the demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center and an ECSP consultant, has developed a model that compares levels of democracy, as measured by the Freedom House index, to a country’s median age, finding that generally countries tend to become more democratic as median age increases.

Using this model, he forecasts a long-term shift towards liberal democracy in Africa, predicting “slow, halting transitions, with exceptions” across the continent over the next 20 years.

Cincotta makes clear, however, that not all regions of Africa are equal in their potential for progress. “The equatorial band is lagging behind the north and south,” he says, since fertility rates – the number of children born per woman – are higher and population growth more rapid. Rapid growth keeps median age low and can stress government capacities, such as they are, paving the way for instability or even conflict. This will be an important challenge for these young nations to overcome, he says.

Youth Discontent

To illustrate how changing fertility rates deeply affect national dispositions Cincotta compares Nigeria, with a total fertility rate of 5.9, to Tunisia, whose rate of 2.1 mirrors many Western nations. While Nigeria is plagued by insurgency and has a quasi-republic troubled by widespread reports of election fraud, Tunisia recently overthrew an authoritarian who had been in power for two decades and ignited the Arab Spring.

Though political change is never the result of just one factor, Cincotta points to the correlation between birthrate and stability in this case as an example of the important effects demography can have on political outcomes. “Can we predict which country will fall into civil conflict and when? No,” he says. Nonetheless, 80 percent of violent conflicts occur in countries with young age structures.

High fertility rates lead to higher percentages of young people and a rapidly growing working-age population, making it more difficult to create a climate of economic growth and stability, according to Cincotta. “It’s very difficult to extend services and maintain them in such a situation…it becomes very easy then to recruit [unemployed young people], especially young men.”

North Africa Is Liberalizing

According to this model, North Africa is at the forefront of democratization on the continent. Waves of liberal movements, spurred on by a growing middle-class, culminated during the Arab Spring with democratic governments established in Tunisia and Algeria, and a hopeful, if short-lived, democratic movement in Egypt (whose population is the youngest in North Africa).

North Africa is “pretty much in that category of relatively low fertility, between two or three children per women,” says Cincotta. “Egypt has come down but not nearly as much as some had hoped,” which may explain its early reversion to authoritarianism. “Countries at the beginning of this age-structure transition have a very poor chance of A) making liberal democracy, and B) keeping it.”

In the near term, not all of Africa is primed for major political transitions. “Expecting liberal democracy at the stage of age-structural transition that most of sub-Saharan Africa is at, at least the equatorial belt, is actually too much,” he says. “We shouldn’t be expecting that.”

Yet in the long term, according to the model, the forecast is bright. “You can guess that about 80 percent of all countries with age structures like that of the United States and Europe…are liberal democracies,” Cincotta says. The age structures of North and South Africa are beginning to look that way, the question remains: will the equatorial countries follow suit?