Topic: Publications

Will Tunisia’s Democracy Survive? A View from Political Demography

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View the article, Will Tunisia’s Democracy Survive? A View from Political Demography, originally published on The New Security Beat.

What chance does Tunisia’s democracy have of withstanding the formidable challenges that periodically arise? Surprisingly, a good chance, according to recent research in political demography, a field that is focused on a limited yet robust set of relationships between demography and political outcomes.

Read the rest of “Will Tunisia’s Democracy Survive?” A View from Political Demography” here …  

Pakistan’s Health and Demography

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View the post, Pakistan’s Health and Demography, originally published on Arms Control Wonk. Another version of this review and commentary is published on The New Security Beat, entitled Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey Shows Slow Progress.

How well did Islamabad measure up in its latest Demographic and Health Survey? Not well, at all. The PDHS results are a disappointment for Pakistan’s public health professionals and women’s health advocates, and they warn of increasingly difficult conditions for rural service delivery. To some health program analysts, the results reflect the low priority given to public health and family planning for decades by Pakistan’s central government.

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Arab Spring: High Food Prices an Unlikely Cause of Revolts

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Read “High Food Prices an Unlikely Cause for the Start of the Arab Spring” by Richard Cincotta, posted on the New Security Beat, April 2014.

Just months after popular uprisings toppled Tunisia and Egypt’s authoritarian regimes, a trio of complex-system researchers published a brief article linking these demonstrations with high levels of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s international Food Price Index. Marco Lagi, Karla Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam’s model, which predicts outbreaks of deadly social conflict when the index tops 210, has since become a popular explanation wielded by many for bouts of popular unrest, including the Arab Spring and overthrow of Ukraine’s government. But were food prices really an underlying “hidden” cause for the start of a wave of instability that is still being felt today?

Not everyone is convinced, least of all, international food policy analysts.

Read the rest of the essay here …. 

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 … 

Iran: Taking Aim at Low Fertility and Women’s Mobility

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Read “Iran: Taking Aim at Low Fertility and Women’s Mobility” published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Philadelphia (PA, USA).

Unlike prior policies that sought to eradicate vestiges of pre-revolution Iran, the government’s most recent actions alter social conditions that were encouraged during much of the Islamic Republic’s three decades of existence: a widespread small-family norm, and gender equality in education. In the ideologically charged political ecology of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, such conditions have been deemed “un-Islamic.”

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