by Patrick Appel
Ronald Bailey suspects so. Among this reasons:
The George Mason University political scientist Jack Goldstone argues that the low median age of these countries’ populations lessens the probability that they will successfully negotiate a transition to democracy. That would follow the pattern spotted by the Stuttgart University researcher Hannes Weber, who in a 2011 study in the journal Democratization looked at data from 110 countries between 1972 and 2009. “Democratic countries with proportionally large male youth cohorts are more likely to become dictatorships than societies with a smaller share of young men,” he writes.
Why?
One hint might be found in an intriguing 2012 study, “On Demographic and Democratic Transitions,” by the London School of Economics population researcher Tim Dyson. Dyson contends that it is no accident that the shift toward lower fertility rates coincided with the rise of democracy in Western Europe. Falling fertility signals that people are gaining more control over their lives. “As the structure of a society becomes increasingly composed of adult men and women, autocratic political structures are likely to be increasingly challenged and replaced by more democratic ones,” Dyson argues. The median ages of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen are 30, 25, 25, 22, and 18 years, respectively. For comparison, the median age of the European Union is 41 years and the United States’ is 37 years.
The Dish 