A Clash of Generations? Youth Bulges and Political Violence

It has frequently been suggested that exceptionally large youth cohorts, the so-called ‘‘youth bulges,’ ’ make countries more susceptible to polit-ical violence. Within two prominent theoretical frameworks in the study of civil war, youth bulges are argued to potentially increase both op-portunities and motives for political violence. This claim is empirically tested in a time-series cross-national statistical model for internal armed conflict for the period 1950–2000, and for event data for terrorism and rioting for the years 1984–1995. The expectation that youth bulges should increase the risk of political violence receives robust support for all three forms of violence. The results are consistent both with an ex-pectation that youth bulges provide greater opportunities for violence through the abundant supply of youths with low opportunity costs, and with an expectation that stronger motives for violence may arise as youth bulges are more likely to experience institutional crowding, in particular unemployment. Some contextual factors have been suggeste