The Effect of Youth Cohort Size, Youth Unemployment and Higher Education on Youth Protest Behaviour within Democracies (1995 -2014)

As the literature on political violence consistently identifies young people as the protagonists of riots and other politically destabilising acts, especially where they form a demographic bulge, we hypothesised in this study that their relative cohort size in the adult population will similarly affect their likelihood of engagement in non-violent political protests. We hypothesised further that the mechanism behind the relationship between Youth Cohort Size (YCS) and youth protest behaviour will be socioeconomically influenced, based on the predictions of two diametrically opposed theories of political participation: grievance theory and the Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM). We tested our hypotheses in a series of multilevel logistic regression analyses, using pooled individual level data on young people’s political participation behaviours from the World Values Survey (WVS) Waves 3-6, and country level data from the World Bank and the United Nations World Population Prospect reports. Our findings show that the relative numbers of young people in the adult population is indeed a significant predictor of young people’s individual protest behaviour. The effect of YCS is, however, moderated by structural socioeconomic factors such as unemployment and tertiary education. The evidence presented in this paper shows that while the interaction of YCS with country level unemployment rates diminishes young people’s proclivity towards protesting, tertiary education significantly enhances the effects of YCS on youth protest behaviour. Notwithstanding, the conflation of all three factors within a country, generally depresses young people’s propensity to protest. The significance of this statistical relationship holds even when controlling for economic development, democratic maturity, postmaterialist values and other individual level determinants of protest behaviour. We argue that resource limitation, as predicted by the Civic Voluntarism Model, more than socioeconomic grievance, as suggested by grievance theory, better explains the relationship between YCS and individual youth protest behaviour within the democratic context. Our findings challenge the popular notion that youth bulge is inimical to political stability, particularly where it conflates with unmatched employment opportunities for educated youth. We argue to the contrary, that economic prosperity, rather than deprivation within a youth bulge is the more likely motivating mechanism for youth protest behaviour within democracies.