Principal Investigators:

Daniel Hart, Robert Atkins, Patrick Markey, James Youniss (Catholic University of America)

Funded by the William T. Grant Foundation

Youth bulges, cohorts of youth ages 16-25 disproportionately large relative to the adult population, are correlated with social upheaval. Limited civic knowledge and heightened civic participation in adolescence, resulting from socialization in communities and countries with large populations of children, are hypothesized to be developmental precursors to political activism characteristic of youth constituting bulges. In two studies with nationally-representative samples, adolescents in communities with disproportionately large populations of children were found to have less civic knowledge, but participate civically more often, than equivalent adolescents in communities without large populations of children. A similar pattern was identified in a third study using country-level data. The three studies support a developmental-psychological explanation for youth bulge phenomena.