Topic: News

Iran in Transition

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Iran in Transition: The Implications of the Islamic Republic’s Changing Demographics

Richard Cincotta & Karim Sadjadpour

December 2017,  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In the late 1980s, Iran’s revolutionary government deployed a series of contraceptive and counseling services that would become one of the world’s most effective voluntary family planning programs. The country’s total fertility rate—the average number of children an Iranian woman could expect to bear during her lifetime—fell from five and a half at the program’s inception to two children per woman about two decades later. Consequently, Iran has entered an economically advantageous demographic window of opportunity, during which its working-age, taxable population far outnumbers children and elderly dependents. This transition has important implications for the country’s economic and political trajectory, as well as for U.S. policy toward Iran. [read more of the summary]

Go to the online version of Iran in Transition.

Download: Iran in Transition.

 

27th Käte Hamburger Lecture, U. Duisburg-Essen

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Title:  Age Structures and State Behaviour: A Political Demographer’s Guide to the Future in National and International Politics

Abstract: Whether their responsibilities cover foreign assistance, diplomacy or defense, policymakers and their staffs regularly seek out realistic assessments of future trends in states and regions upon which they focus. In 2006, as part of its Global Trends publications effort, analysts at the US National Intelligence Council began to explore the possibility of producing ‘timed statistical forecasts’ by coupling theories from age-structural political demography with the UN Population Division’s demographic projections. The effort has produced easily-communicated graphical models that can be regenerated and tested, and forecasts that have regularly out-performed conventional analyses by country and regional experts. Although limited in scope, these simple demographic models provide fresh insights into the expected timing of the rise of specific political, social, and economic indicators (including liberal democracy; civil conflict; and discrete levels of per-capita income, educational attainment, and child survival) among modern states—some of which disagree with conventional wisdom.

The lecture summarizes the methods and findings of the recent Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2017) article entitled “The Age-structural Theory of State Behavior“.

Speaker: Richard Cincotta

Date: Nov. 22, 2017, Time: 18:30-20h
Venue: University of Duisburg-Essen, Room LS 105, Lotharstr. 53, 47057 Duisburg

National Academy of Sciences, SBS/Decadal Survey: White Paper on Political Demography

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WHITE PAPER: Assessing Political Demography’s Potential Application to Foreign Policy, Defense, and Intelligence Analyses

Authors: Richard Cincotta, Jack A. Goldstone and Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba

This white paper describes ongoing progress in political demography and its contributions to foreign affairs analysis, defense planning, and intelligence analysis. Political demography—“the study of the size, composition, and distribution of the population in relation to both government and politics” (Weiner and Teitelbaum, 2001)—has accumulated a substantial body of descriptive and predictive theory over the past 50 years. Although slow and discontinuous during much of that history, the field has more recently begun to coalesce, as evidenced by a spike in publication of works in the field and the creation of the Political Demography & Geography Section of the International Studies Association.

To continue, download full paper

To visit the National Academies’ Social and Behavioral Sciences Decadal Survey on National Security web page, click here.

 

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Age-structural functions: their directionality and punctuality

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What is an Age-structural Function?

    An age-structural function is a two-dimensional graphic form of an age-structural model. This function describes a range (Y-axis) of probabilities of being within a category at all points (median ages) across the age-structural domain (the X-axis of the graph). To neatly capture nearly all recent positions in the age-structural transition, now and in the foreseeable future, the standard form of this graph extends over a domain that begins at a median age of 15 years and ends at 55 years. This standardized form is not perfect. Over the course of UN Population Division (UNPD) estimates (1950 to 2015), the populations of a few states (including Niger in 2015) have experienced median ages below 15.0 years. On the high side of the domain, however, no country-level age structure has yet gone beyond a median age of 48. Nonetheless, the UN Population Division projects that Japan will reach a median age higher than 50 years before 2030, and that several European and additional East Asian countries will follow it into the post-mature phase (a median age of 45.6 or higher) soon thereafter.

Not all age-structural functions that are fit to data by an age-structural model are qualitatively similar. Age-structural functions have been categorized into three qualitative classes (I, II, III), according to the conditions associated with the age-structural function that they describe (Fig. 1). These conditions influence the form and fit of the age-structural function.[i]

These three classes suggest differences in the strength of the relationship’s directionality and punctuality. Functional directionality can also be expressed as the ratio between the frequency at which it advances into a category, relative to the frequency at which it retreats back into this category. Class I age-structural functions (such as income and education functions) express high ratios of directionality and feedback between the indicator and movement along the age structural transition (or fertility decline). Class III functions (such as the frequency of intra-state conflict or the initiation of intra-state conflict) typically express low ratios. Class II functions (such as being assessed as Free in Freedom House’s annual survey) are like class I functions, but not as directional. States backslide more often, and there may be very little feedback, if any, associated with the relationship. Functional punctuality measures the tendency for advancement to be associated with a particular median age. This quality can be measured by the steepness of the curve (i.e., value of first derivative) at its inflection point (where p=0.50). Class I age-structural functions are most punctual; class III, the least.

 

Figure 1. Three classes of age-structural function (I, II, III). Each is associated with a particular set of dynamics exhibited by states, in terms of a categorical dependent variable (Y), over the length of the age-structural domain (X axis).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] Cincotta, R. 2017. “The Age-structural Theory of State Behavior.” in Oxford Reference Encyclopedia: Empirical International Relations Theory, edited by W. Thompson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Download here.

NIC Global Trends: Paradox of Progress

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Political demography has become a fixture in the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends publications (see the NIC’s latest addition to the GT series, “Paradox of Progress”, pages 161-167; as well as sections in Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World; and Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Nonetheless, we are still far from the day when young analysts in the US intelligence community routinely consider political demography’s “7 basic rules” as essential analytical tools.

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