Demographic Factors as Predictors of Revolutionary Situations: Experience in Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

Although there are plenty of quantitative cross-national analyses on the influence of population age structure on revolutionary risks, there are currently not enough studies that examine its impact on the risks of armed and unarmed revolutions taken separately. Assuming that the dependence of potential political destabilization on the median age will differ for armed and unarmed revolutions, we propose the following hypothesis. High median age and the level of a country’s economic development will negatively correlate with armed revolutions. A moderately young median age will have positive influence on the risks of non-violent rebellions, while the overall dependence of unarmed revolutions on median age will be slightly positive and curvilinear. Relying on materials from NAVCO 1.3 and the UN Population Division databases and by means of utilizing cross-tabulations, correlations and logistic regression, we analyze about 250 revolutionary episodes between 1950 and 2019. All of our hypotheses turn out to be supported. The higher the median age of the population — the less likely the occurrence will be of armed revolutionary instability. On the other hand, as the population ages, the risks of unarmed revolutionary actions first grow, but then decline.

Revolutions and Democracy

“…It has also been found that the size of the population itself is a powerful predictor of both revolutionary events in general (Besançon, 2005;Butcher & Svensson, 2016;Chenoweth & Ulfelder, 2017;Dahl et al, 2021;Ustyuzhanin, Zhodzishskaya et al, 2022) and protests in particular (Hegre and Sambanis 2006;Romanov et al, 2021), while anti-government demonstrations are a major component of the revolutionary repertoire of unarmed revolutionary uprisings (Lawson, 2019). This variable is presented in thousands by the Cross-National Time-Series (CNTS) Data Archive (Banks & Wilson, 2021), and we introduce its natural logarithm in order to normalize it and to understand how the difference in population affects not in thousands, but in orders of magnitude.…”