Research Article Youth Bulges in Communities The Effects of Age Structure on Adolescent Civic Knowledge and Civic Participation

portionately large relative to the adult population, are linked with social upheaval in historical research. Limited civic knowledge and heightened civic participation in adolescence, resulting from socialization in communities with large popula-tions of children, are hypothesized to be developmental pre-cursors to the political activism characteristic of youth constituting bulges. In two studies with nationally representa-tive samples, adolescents in communities with disproportion-ately large populations of children were found to have less civic knowledge than equivalent adolescents in communities without large populations of children. In both studies, civic participa-tion was predicted by the interaction of a community’s propor-tion of children and its poverty level. Similar patterns were identified in a third study using country-level data. Together, the findings demonstrate that the youthfulness of communities and countries influences civic development. Youth bulge refers to a cohort of youth between the ages of 16 and 25 that is unusually large relative to the adult population in a society. Historical research has linked youth bulges to revolutions in 17th