Population Age Structures Moderate the Association of Legal and Illegal Forms of Civic Action

• In Event: 2-115 - Youth Civic Engagement Across Cultural, Social, and Political Contexts

Integrative Statement

Youth frequently fuel demonstrations, riots, and revolutions. Historians of the civil rights movement and rioting in the United States frequently point to the contributions of young people, as do political scientists studying recent political unrest in Africa and the Middle East. Implicit but untested in these accounts is the relation of legal and illegal forms of civic participation. Consider U.S. youth in the 1960’s; they were central to both rights-advancing, principled action and to destructive chaotic rioting. But the involvement of youth in both legal and illegal civic participation is relatively anomalous in recent American history. For most of the last 60 years, American youth have predominantly participated in legal, regime-affirming civic activities. How is it possible that legal and illegal civic action characterizes youth in some historical periods but not in others?
I begin to answer this question in this contribution to the symposium. I propose that legal and illegal civic participation become fused when the age structure of a population is particularly young—which was true of the United States in the 1960’s. When a population is dominated by adults, legal and illegal forms of civic participation are differentiated, and the former dominates.
To explore this hypothesis, I use data from the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study of 2016. Large, representative samples of eighth graders from 24 countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia responded to surveys tapping civic knowledge, attitudes, current and future civic actions, among many items. Of particular interest here are two scales constructed from these items, one tapping future potential participation in legal activities (e.g., boycotting, petitioning, online campaigns) and another concerning future potential participation in illegal activities (spray-painting protest slogans, traffic-blocking protests, occupying buildings). The percentage of the population younger than 15 for each country was obtained from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.
Within a multilevel model, using a subsample of the data, the percentage of the population younger than 15 moderated the association of legal and illegal forms of civic participation. The nature of this association is depicted in Figure 1. The same analysis was conducted in five independent subsamples, and in each subsample, the interaction of legal civic participation and child saturation was statistically significant. To test the specificity and robustness of the finding a variety of covariates were tested, including per capita GDP, nation-indices of political functioning, and civic knowledge. None of the covariates accounted for the association depicted in Figure 1.
The central finding is that in populations with very young populations young teenagers’ projections of their future legal and illegal civic actions are highly correlated—as if the illegal occupation of buildings and petitioning are indistinguishable. In populations with relatively few children and adults, the propensity for legal civic participation is largely independent of projections of future involvement in illegal activity.
I conclude with a brief discussion of the reasons why legal and illegal civic actions become fused in very young populations and a listing of historical anomalies partially resolved by this perspective.

Author

• Daniel Hart, Rutgers
  Presenting Author