Conventional literature associates large youth cohort size (YCS) with increased risk of political violence in countries with such demographic profiles. Key questions which remain unanswered, however, are whether YCS is also associated with young people’s proclivities toward more peaceful forms of protests, and whether structural socioeconomic conditions influence such a relationship? Using multilevel binary logistic regression techniques on pooled individual level data for 51 democratic countries purposively sampled from World Values Survey Waves 3 to 6, and country level data from World Bank, and UN Population Division, I show that YCS demonstrates a positive relationship with young people’s participation in peaceful demonstrations. This relationship is, however, moderated by structural factors such as education and unemployment, which end up reducing young people’s likelihood of participation. I argue that resource limitation, as predicted by the Civic Voluntarism Model, better explains the relationship between YCS and individual youth protest behavior in democratic societies, more than socioeconomic grievance, as suggested by grievance theory. An important implication of this finding is that participation in elite-challenging behaviors such as peaceful protests, can be expected to be more common among young people in affluent democratic societies, than their peers elsewhere in the democratic world.
The underlying ambition of fee-free education is to increase school access. This study reflects on decentralisation in the decision-making process and implementation of fee-free policies. We compare two policies at the high school level in Ghana to evaluate the differences and commonalities in how they responded to school access. We used interviews and secondary sources of data for qualitative content analysis. Haddad and Demsky’s rationality framework of education policymaking served as the analytical guide. The results show that Free Senior High School policy (FSHS) increased access to education by responding to the existing problem of low rate of transition from lower secondary to upper secondary education, unlike Progressive Free Senior High School policy (PFSHS). However, the desirability of access is over-prioritised in the current FSHS – unlike in the PFSHS, leaving gaps in administration, educational facilities and resources: challenges attributable to the concentration of centralised administrative decisions during policy formulation and implementation. We propose remedial measures to address these challenges.
This paper aims to investigate whether a country's youth cohort size and quality of democracy, independently and jointly predict young people's propensity to support democracy as a political system. We use pooled data from World Values Survey Waves 5-7, comprising 81 country-waves with 25,125 observations from 39 established and new democracies, in multilevel binary logistic regression analyses. The paper finds evidence that firstly, against conventional expectations, a large youth cohort exerts a positive influence on young people's support for democracy as a political system. Secondly, the effect of youth cohort size depends on the quality of democracy of countries: young people growing as part of the youth cohorts in established democracies show stronger propensities to support democracy than their peers in new democracies. This has implications for both theory and empirical research.
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