"Non-violent but still Dangerous": Testing the Link between "Youth Bulges" and the Intensity of Non-violent Protest Activity

Changing of youth population has long been in the focus of scientific discussion, no research has systematically examined the dependency between ‘youth bulge’ and non-violent protest activity. Scholars of political demography mostly focused on how ‘youth bulge’ influences political violence. Since many previous studies demonstrate the strong empirical dependency between increasing youth cohorts and political violence, we hypothesize that ‘youth bulges’ could influence the rise of non-violent protests as well. Following previous research on this topic, we measure ‘youth bulges’ as a proportion of young people 15–24 years old and 15–29 years old to the total adult population over 15 years old and as a proportion of young men 15–24 years old and 15–29 years old to the total adult population over 15 years of age. In addition, we are testing the so-called "Huntington’s hypothesis" about the non-linear link between ‘youth bulges’ and the intensity of antigovernment demonstrations. To examine the dependency between ‘youth bulge’ and non-violent protests we apply negative binomial regression with fixed-effects due to specific features of our dependent variable and panel data. We find that all suggested operationalizations of ‘youth bulges’ have almost the same link with the intensity of non-violent antigovernment demonstrations. As a result, we find that the ‘youth bulges’ (ages 15 to 24/ages 15 to 29) are positive statistically significant predictors of antigovernment demonstrations. Similar results have been obtained for the “men youth bulges” (ages 15 to 24/ages 15 to 29). So-called ‘Huntington’s hypothesis’ has not been verified implying the absence of a special ‘threshold’, crossing which ‘youth bulges’ become especially prone to trigger the intensity of protests activity.