This study investigates the effect that formal education, as a factor of socio-economic development, has on the intensity and forms of political protest. By way of increased socialization of democratic values, increased cognitive understanding of the society at large, and human capital to participate in protests, increases in a country’s level of formal education should theoretically lead to increased levels of peaceful protest. However, increases in formal education are also theorized to play a mitigating role on the intensity of violent protests (riots) for the previously mentioned reasons as well as the fact that education acts as a strong factor in increasing social mobility. With data from 1960 to 2010 and spanning 216 countries, our empirical tests demonstrate a significant positive relationship between formal education and the intensity of anti-government protests at the early stages of socio-political development and a strong negative relationship between education and riots along the full range of data, with the later stages of development revealing a particularly strong negative correlation.
The current article investigates societal indicators associated with economic development that may account for the strong positive correlation between GDP per capita and protest intensity. The authors’ tests reveal that the expansion of democratization, education, and urbanization are one of the main influences accounting for this positive relationship between GDP per capita growth and anti-government protest intensity. Moreover, when controlling for these factors, the relationship between GDP per capita and anti-state protests becomes negative indicating that the forces associated with economic development at a certain point play a larger role than economic growth itself. The results of this study, thus, have implications for both Resource Mobilization and Cultural Theorists due to the fact that further GDP per capita growth becomes an inhibitor of protests in the high-income countries instead of a promoter.
Demographic changes associated with the transition from traditional to modern economies underlie many modern theories of protest formation. Both the level of urbanization and the “Youth Bulge” effect have proven to be particularly reliable indicators for predicting protest events. However, given that in the course of economic development these processes often occur simultaneously, it seems logical to put forward the hypothesis that the combined effect of urbanization growth and an increase in the number of young people will be a more relevant factor for predicting protests. Our study of cross-national time series from 1950 to 2016 shows that the combined effect of these two parameters is an extremely strong predictor of anti-government protests in a single country, even more so than traditional indicators such as democratization, per capita GDP, and the level of education.
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