Topic: Forecasts

Israel: Ethno-religious Demography and the Future of Electoral Politics

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View “Government without the Ultra-Orthodox?: Demography and the Future of Israeli Politics” by Richard Cincotta, published in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s E-Notes, December 2013.

It would be hard to conjure up a more grave and immediate set of peacetime challenges than those that Israel faces—from the advances in Iran’s nuclear program, to the political instabilities that continue to play out along the length of its borders. Yet, the outcome of the January 2013 election of the 19th Knesset appears to have been shaped less by the Israeli public’s perceptions of foreign threats, and more by its domestic concerns.

This brief note raises two questions: How did Yesh Atid rise from a virtual standing start to claim a critical position in Israel’s 33rd government? And what does this party’s electoral achievement mean for the future of Israel’s democracy?

Download “Government Without the Ultra-Orthodox?” here … 

The 2008 Prediction for Liberal Democracy

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The 2008 Forecast of “at least one, maybe two” liberal democracies (FREE in Freedom House’s end-of-year survey) among the five Mediterranean North African states (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Egypt), and among a three-state cluster in South America (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador) by 2020. This prediction is published in two articles before the Arab Spring: Cincotta, R.P. 2008. “How Democracies Grow Up: Countries with Too Many Young People May Not Have a Fighting Chance for Freedom.” Foreign Policy (165):80-82; Cincotta, R.P. 2008/09. “Half a Chance: Youth Bulges and Transitions to Liberal Democracy.” Environmental Change and Security Program Report 13:10-18. (the following is excerpted from a recent submission).

 

Relationship between median age (i.e., age-structural maturity) and the probability of being assessed as FREE by Freedom House. Estimates for PARTLY FREE and NOT FREE are shown as well.

While not the Age-structural Theory’s only prescient forecast, this initial set of forecasts more than two years prior to the Arab Spring remains the most dramatic display of the theory’s ability to “out-do the experts”, and the most illustrative of the theory’s yet unexplored potential.

Based on an age-structural model, in a 2008 article in Foreign Policy (Cincotta, 2008; a similar quote appears in Cincotta, 2008-09, p. 15), I wrote:

The first (and perhaps most surprising) region that promises a shift to liberal democracy is a cluster along Africa’s Mediterranean coast: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, none of which has experienced liberal democracy in the recent past. The other area is in South America: Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, each of which attained liberal democracy demographically “early” but was unable to sustain it. Interpreting these forecasts conservatively, we can expect there will be one, maybe two, in each group that will become stable liberal democracies by 2020 (p. 82).”

I first presented this forecast at a US State Department-sponsored expert meeting on the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) in February 2008, where I repeated this forecast and suggested that Tunisia, because of its sustained near-replacement fertility and the rapid maturing of that country’s population age structure, was a likely launch point for democratization before 2020. Most of the nearly two dozen attending academics specializing in the MENA Region (including several natives of the region), plus government analysts in attendance, burst into raucous laughter—so much laughter that the meeting’s chairman was forced to terminate the session.

In October 2010, two months before demonstrations erupted across Tunisia, I submitted the following unclassified forecast to a US intelligence agency requesting the submission of “low probability, high impact events” that might occur over the next two years, affecting US interests:

In this scenario, a North African state, probably Tunisia, undergoes a “color revolution”—a swift and non-violent transition to liberal democracy. This may bring Islamists into power—or maybe not.  However, the possibilities for spreading democracy through the region and for new political dynamics to play out in an age-structurally maturing Arab state could produce both risks and opportunities for the US.

After Tunisia’s and Egypt’s revolutions successfully upended what Middle East analysts had assumed to be rock-solid autocratic regimes, Nasim Taleb and Mark Blyth (2011) identified the North African uprisings as the culmination of an extended build-up of suppressed social forces, culminating in a politically explosive event, the nature and timing of which were impossible to predict—a “Black Swan.”

Yet, regime change in North Africa was clearly not impossible to predict. More than two years prior to the North African revolutions, I had used Age-structural Theory to confront influential academic Middle East experts and US government analysts with what I consider to be a “reasonable image” of this future—an image generated by associating the attainment of liberal democracy with a phase of the age-structural transition. They simply chose to believe that this image, and the method that conveyed it, were absurd.

The forecast of “one, maybe two” North African liberal democracies before 2020—states assigned Free status, rather than Partly Free or Not Free, in Freedom House’s annual global assessment of political rights and civil liberties—was realized in 2014 with Freedom House’s assessment of Tunisia as Free (Freedom House, 2015). Since then, Colombia’s peace process has lurched haltingly forward, making a second published forecast from the original 2008 forecast look increasingly promising for 2017 (in Freedom House’s 2018 assessment): the rise of a liberal democracy before 2020 among the three-state cluster of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador (Cincotta, 2008; 2008-09). In its recent assessment at the end of 2016, Freedom House (2017) placed Colombia on the very borderline between Partly Free and Free—a Freedom Score of 3.0, trending upwards toward Free.

One well-known Middle East scholar laughed until he was in tears. Because the laughter did not subside, the session’s chair ended the question and answer session. Later, when the group was polled by the convener, only two of the roughly two dozen scholars at the session believed that there were any lessons to be learned from this politico-demographic analysis. After the Tunisia’s demonstrators had ousted President Ben Ali, I called or emailed several of the individuals who attended the meeting, inviting them to learn more about the method or to collaborate to help analysts overcome the problem of “timing”. I received no positive response from those I contacted.

Population Aging: A Demographic and Geographic Overview

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Read “Population Aging: A Demographic and Geographic Overview” by Richard Cincotta, published in the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 blog, and in the New Security Beat, July, 2012. Download “Population Aging: A Demographic and Geographic Overview” here …

This GT2030 blog, focused on population aging, begins with this introductory essay aimed at familiarizing readers with some of the demographic and geographic particulars of this phenomenon, and with several key demographic terms. The term most in need of definition is, of course, population aging. Strictly speaking, aging is any shift in the population’s age structure (the distribution of individuals, by age) that produces an increase in the median age (the age of the individual for whom one-half of the population is younger). Generally, advances in a population’s median age are associated with increases in the proportion of seniors (aged 65 years and older), and declines in the proportion of children (younger than 15). Sustained population aging leads to a relatively older workforce, slowed workforce growth and slowed growth among school-age children.
While various age-specific patterns of birth, death and migration can induce change in the median age, over the past century two demographic processes have contributed most powerfully to country-level population aging. First and foremost is declining fertility (fertility is usually measured by computing the total fertility rate (TFR), an immediate estimate of the number of children that women are bearing over their reproductive lifetime). The second most influential factor has been increasing longevity. Not all trends associated with modernization, however, contribute to aging. Declines in childhood mortality have served to slow aging’s pace or make it retreat, as have waves of youthful immigrants (until the immigrants themselves age) and occasio
nal baby booms.

Is an advance in the median age bad news? That depends on “where you are” the broad diversity of age structures suggested by today’s lengthy spectrum of median ages—which in 2012 stretches from around 16 years (Niger, Uganda, Mali) to around 45 (Japan, Germany). For states in the youthful phase of the age-structural transition (median age 25.4 years or less; see Figure 1), the near-term net economic, social, political outcomes of aging are overwhelmingly positive. Getting to the next next age-structural phase— the intermediate phase (25.5 to 35.4)—is crucial; it is associated with very high support ratios (working-age adults per child), diminished risk of intra-state conflict, the accumulation of human capital, and higher savings (among “saver” societies).
There are growing indications that states might develop more quickly by sustaining their intermediate phase—which, for very-low-fertility states, has been rather fleeting (for example, China recently departed the intermediate phase after entering 25 years ago). In fact, states that have achieved near-universal secondary education and sustained a lengthy period of economic prosperity and liberal-democratic stability, including the US, have done so during their population’s presence within the so-called age-structural sweet spot: starting in the their intermediate phase and finishing during the first half of the mature phase (the mature phase ranges from 35.5 to 45.4 years).

The forthcoming essays in this blog are focused “beyond the sweet spot.” It is concerned with the challenges and possible outcomes of “advanced aging”—a condition never before encountered—that will evolve in the so-called post-mature phase (median age >45.5 years) of the age structural transition. Countries approaching the end of the mature phase, most in Europe and East Asia, are accumulating large proportions of seniors, most of whom are moving out of the workforce, drawing on pensions, drawing down personal savings and other accumulated assets, and accepting transfers from their children, other relatives, and other public and non-profit sources. As they age, seniors face an increasing risk of morbidity due to chronic illness and declining physical mobility, as well as an increasing risk of poverty.

While improvements in healthcare and nutrition promise to compress the late-in-life period of high morbidity and permit the extension of workforce participation, the projected declines in the number of working-age adults per retiree (the old-age support ratio) in European and East Asian states over the coming two decades is unprecedented. These projections suggest that those states heading for a post-mature future need to deftly manipulate a full range of social and fiscal policy levers in order to mediate, and adapt to, the cost burdens that are poised to descend upon their pension and healthcare systems. Simultaneously, most of these states will likely wrestle with the challenging and politically delicate task of encouraging the reestablishment of near-replacement-level TFR.

The four age-structural phases experienced by Japan (1935, 1970, 1990, 2025 (projected).

As of 2012, only Japan and German have attained the 45-year median-age mark—and just within the past year or two. Significantly, both countries face “negative momentum”; in other words, because of several decades of annual TFRs below 1.5 children per woman and steadily increasing life expectancies, these and other very-low-fertility states are projected to continue to age for the foreseeable future—until old-age mortality dissipates their populations’ currently broad bulges of seniors and middle-agers, and fertility or migration significantly enlarges their childhood and young adult cohorts. In other words, advanced aging is not a momentary inconvenience.

By 2030, advanced aging will have spread widely through Europe (see figure 2: world maps, 2015 and 2030). Current projections by demographers at the US Census Bureau’s International Program Center (International Data Base, June 2011) suggest that the populations of 29 states (each over 1 million residents) will experience a median age over 45.0 years by 2030. Of these, the Census Bureau indicates that 26 will be located in Europe and 3 in East Asia (Japan, Taiwan and South Korea). Despite China’s rapid pace of aging, US Census Bureau projections place its 2030 median age at 43 years, very similar to the UN Population Division’s medium fertility-variant projection for the PRC. The UN Population Division, using a somewhat different set of projection assumptions to produce its medium fertility variant, projects that by 2030 this post-mature group of countries (median age >45.0 years) will consist of 19 states: 14 European, 4 East Asian (including Singapore), and Cuba.

Richard Cincotta is Demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, and a consultant on political demography for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. From 2006-09, he served as a long-range analyst for the National Intelligence Council.

 

Life Begins After 25: Demography and the Societal Timing of the Arab Spring

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Read “Life Begins after 25: Demography and the Societal Timing of the Arab Spring” by Richard Cincotta, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, January 2012.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Gregory Gausse recounts how regional specialists, like himself, overestimated the strength and cohesiveness of North Africa’s autocracies, as well as the depth of personal allegiances available to these authoritarians among their military’s highest ranks. Little, if any, mention has been made, however, of an article describing the relationship between demography and democracy (“How Democracies Grow Up”) that was printed on the pages of Foreign Policy in March of 2008—more than two-and-a-half years before pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets in Tunisia—nor of an article published by the Woodrow Wilson Center (“Half a Chance“), published in early 2009. In those essays, I describe a simple model driven by population age structure (the distribution of population by age) that can be used to statistically forecast democratization, with reasonable success.

Attachments

Whither the Demographic Arc of Instability

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Read “Whither the Demographic Arc of Instability?“, an essay by Richard Cincotta featured on the Stimson Center Spotlight, November 2011.

One map that quickly garnered the attention of strategists outlined the world’s weak and politically fractious states – a pattern that came to be known as the “arc of instability” (Map 1, for 2000). Inside the arc, authoritarian governments ruled with little regard for law, insurgencies undermined economic hopes, and militant organizations capable of international terror, some linked to Al Qaida, were equipped and trained. Outside the arc existed a world of modern industrial and service economies, globalized communications, and trade.

Download “Whither the Demographic Arc of Instability? ” here …