Demographic Transition and Rise of Modern Representative Democracy

By focusing solely on the institutional reforms and changes in the political leadership that precede political liberalisation, studies on the determinants of democracy have often overlooked the influence of demographic factors such as population age structure as a catalyst for and reflection of a host of changes in societies that can affect governance and stability of liberal democracy. It is not surprising, noting the recent revolutions such as the Arab spring and the Egyptian Uprising , that numerous research now tends to spotlight the so called youth bulge and how they tend to either support authoritarian regimes or sustain liberal democracies as a result of youth-led democracy movements as witnessed in Costa Rica, India, Jamaica and South Africa (Cincotta, R. (2008/09).