Anti-democratic youth? The influence of youth cohort size and quality of democracy on young people’s support for democracy

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to investigate whether a country’s youth cohort size and quality of democracy, independently and jointly predict young people’s propensity to support democracy as a political system. We use pooled data from World Values Survey Waves 5–7, comprising 81 country-waves with 25,125 observations from 39 established and new democracies, in multilevel binary logistic regression analyses. The paper finds evidence that firstly, against conventional expectations, a large youth cohort exerts a positive influence on young people’s support for democracy as a political system. Secondly, the effect of youth cohort size depends on the quality of democracy of countries: young people growing as part of the youth cohorts in established democracies show stronger propensities to support democracy than their peers in new democracies. This has implications for both theory and empirical research.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth cohort size
• quality of democracy
• youth bulge
• support for democracy
• young people

Acknowledgement

We want to express our gratitude to Zsófia Papp for her expert advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 World Values Survey data accessible from (www.worldvaluessurvey.org).

2 EIU data accessible from https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020/.

3 UN population data accessible from https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/.

4 World Bank data accessible from (https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators#).

5 WVS questionnaire for 2010-2014. Same questions repeated in the waves 5 and 7. Available at file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/F00001101WV6_Official_Questionnaire_v4_June2012.pdf (p. 9).

6 The results of the likelihood ratio test and the Brant test for the original four ordered categories of the dependent variable showed that the parallel regression assumption was violated. Despite all efforts, however, the better suited non-proportional odds models could not converge. We could also not estimate the interaction effects and predicted probability plot. We therefore opted for a binary DV: Bad vrs. Good. This allowed us to estimate our models, the interactions effects and predicted probability plot.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Godfred Bonnah Nkansah

Godfred Bonnah Nkansah A Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of International Relations and Political Science – Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary. His research interests include youth politics, democratic theory, development, and governance.

Attila Bartha

Attila Bartha Associate Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest & Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Sciences. His research interests include economic policy analysis, governance, social policy, and public policy analysis.