Volume 54, Issue 2 p. 778-793
Original Article

YOUTH, REVOLUTION, AND REPRESSION

Mehdi Shadmehr

Mehdi Shadmehr

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, 33146

Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544

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Peter Haschke

Peter Haschke

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina–Asheville, Asheville, NC, 28804

The authors wish to thank Dan Bernhardt, Jose Cheibub, Luke Fitzpatrick, Justin Fox, Mark Gibney, Jude Hays, Kerim Kavakli, Patrick Kuhn, Paulina Marek, Michael Peress, Bing Powell, Kjetil Storesletten, Milan Svolik, James Vreeland, seminar participants at the University of Rochester department of political science, UIUC department of economics, and MPSA Conference.Search for more papers by this author
First published: 04 November 2015
Citations: 10

Abstract

We develop a simple model to study the effect of age structure on the interactions between the state and dissidents. Younger populations are more prone to protest. As the population grows younger, states that can discriminately target repression to different groups, but cannot concede discriminately, decrease repression. In contrast, states that can target concession, but not repression, increase repression. We test these results in nonmilitary single-party regimes and military regimes without political parties. Moreover, we study state response to dissent in East European communist regimes in the late 1980s, showing that state response was more repressive in countries with younger populations. (JEL D74)

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