YOUTH, REVOLUTION, AND REPRESSION

I. INTRODUCTION The Protester was Time Magazine's person of the year in 2011. But who are the protesters? According to Time, "everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated" (Time December 2011, 61). This study focuses on the first characteristic: We develop a simple model to study the effect of age structure on protest, and investigate the state's response to increases in the proportion of the young. The radicalism of the young and their disproportionate participation in social unrest is a robust empirical finding. (1) However, despite abundant evidence linking age structure to social unrest, this aspect has gone largely unstudied in the literature on protest, revolution, and repression. (2) Our main theoretical contribution is to show that the potential for revolution increases as the population becomes younger, but the state's response to this threat is subtle. In particular, when the population becomes younger, repression decreases if the state can target repression to different age groups, but cannot target concessions, that is, concessions have to be made to all dissidents. Our model is based on that of Acemoglu and Robinson (2001, 2006). There is a continuum of agents distinguished by their income into the rich and the poor. Each agent lives two periods. She is young in the first period, and becomes old in the second period. Therefore, there are two poor groups: young poor and old poor. Each group has a representative agent, and the fraction of that group in the population is the size of this representative agent. The poor may challenge the status quo distribution of income by mounting a revolution. (3) The revolution succeeds if at least one poor group revolts, in which case the poor confiscate all the assets of the rich, and share the whole income evenly forever. But the revolution destroys a fraction of income. Revolution is equally costly for the young and the old, but the young enjoy their higher income for a longer period, and hence have more incentives to revolt. The state protects the interests of the rich who want to maintain the status quo. At the beginning of each period, the state chooses a combination of repression and redistribution. When the state represses a poor group (young or old), that group cannot mobilize and revolt. But repression costs a fraction of the income of the rich. The cost is increasing in the size of the group that is repressed. Alternatively, the state can redistribute income to a poor group (young or old). The costs of redistribution depend on both the size and the age of the group: Because the young have more to gain from the revolution, the state must redistribute more to prevent them from revolting. After the state has determined the level of redistribution, and if the state has not repressed a group (young or old poor), that group decides whether to revolt. Because conceding to the young is more expensive to the rich, one may think that as the population grows younger, the likelihood of repression always increases. However, we show that whether a state increases repression or concession hinges on whether the state can discriminately target repression and concession toward different groups. (4) When the state can target concessions, but cannot target repression, the likelihood of repression increases as the population grows younger. In contrast, when the state can target repression, but cannot target concession, the likelihood of repression decreases when the population becomes younger. (5) To see the logic, suppose the state can target repression, but not redistribution. First, consider the simpler case when the costs of revolution are high enough that only the young impose a threat of revolution, that is, the old nonelite have no incentive to revolt. Because a revolution is more costly for the rich than repression and redistribution, the state chooses a combination to avoid revolution. Thus, in effect, the state can either repress the young, or redistribute indiscriminately to the whole poor population at a level that prevents the young from revolting. …