Politics & International Relations
Demographics
Demographics refer to statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it, such as age, gender, income, education, and ethnicity. In the political and international relations context, understanding demographics is crucial for analyzing voting patterns, public opinion, and social dynamics, and for formulating policies and strategies that cater to specific demographic groups.
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6 Key excerpts on "Demographics"
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eBook - ePubDemographics
A Guide to Methods and Data Sources for Media, Business, and Government
- Steven H. Murdock, Chris Kelley, Jeffrey L. Jordan, Beverly Pecotte, Alvin Luedke(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Figure 1.1 derived from Murdock and Ellis (1991:7). As is evident from an examination of the items in this figure, demography not only examines the basic factors of population change and the fertility, mortality, and migration processes that produce such change, but also spans a large number of related substantive issue areas such as aging, family, and household patterns; changes in socioeconomic factors such as income and education; and changes in the industrial and occupational composition of an area’s workforce.Despite the obvious breadth of topics covered by professional demographers, the term Demographics has an even wider meaning. Demographics is a nontechnical term generally used to connote information and data on the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of a population that affect its use of, its participation in, and/or its access to specific types of goods and services. It involves the examination of how demographic factors affect such things as the markets for goods and services, school enrollment, the best location for a commercial facility, or the identification of the appropriate populations for labor force recruitment.The forms of analyses being examined in this work obviously fit within the realm of the social and applied forms of demography. Although some technical issues will be discussed as they are used in applied areas, readers wanting more technical explanations should refer to more specialized texts (see, for example, Siegel and Swanson 2004; Siegel 2002).Figure 1.1: Major Variables/Dimensions in a Demographic AnalysisWhat Will Be Examined in this Text and Why?
Despite increasing familiarity with the term Demographics
eBook - ePub- Miranda Thurston(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Population ageing appears likely to dominate the thinking of many politicians in high-income countries in future decades. This demographic feature, however, reflects long-term improvements in the social and economic living conditions of populations. In other words, it is a reflection of improved standards of living and a longer life. Alongside these concerns are those that relate to population growth in many low-income countries. Not only does a demographic perspective reveal such inequalities, it also points towards a better understanding of the implications of continued global population growth for the environment, climate change, food security, the economy, and so on, as well as population health and longevity.
- Susan Strange, Susan Strange(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
To be sure, there is optimism in some quarters—especially perhaps among some economists, technological fixers and theists. But hardly a month passes that one more baleful prognostication of man’s future is not published. Doomsday authors are among the best-sellers, no matter the dubious nature of many computerised games simulating various scenarios of food, fuels, minerals, materials, environmental degradation, economic growth and population growth. Such studies tend to be flawed by the well-known fallacies of ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, Trejudice in, prejudice out’ (Simon, 1981). At the very least, however, one may be certain that continued population growth in most societies entails, as Ridker (1979, p. 121) has pointed out, more local conflicts over land and water use, the need to live with even greater uncertainties and risks of major ecological or nuclear disasters, more dependence on rapid scientific and technological development to reduce the uncertainties and risks and few social options, and the continued postponement of the resolution of other problems, including those resulting from past growth. On the other hand, if rapid population increase can be slowed down, there are political and economic advantages: more time, resources and additional options by means of which to overcome ignorance, redress mistakes of past growth, implement solutions and plan with greater freedom of choice.As human beings we are all ecologically dependent and substantively demographic—even statistically treatable, however abhorrent that fact may be to Lord Snow’s ‘literary-humanists’. If the brotherhood of man amounts to nothing more than this, our common membership in nature’s web, the consequences are not insignificant, especially today. But there is another underlying aspect of ‘world politics and population’ to be noted in these introductory pages. And that is power. That population is an ingredient of national power to be inventoried, rulers from Caesar Augustus and the Han Dynasty to the present have demonstrated by taking censuses and surveys of their people. This is not surprising in as much as it is people who both produce and consume. And national political power derives from the quality and quantity of people as contributors, supporters, allies, enemies, voters, as well as from the economy. The powers of nations, I take it, are the very stuff of international politics. Which brings me to the question set for this chapter: ‘what should every lecturer in politics know about population as a factor in the political economy of the world?’Obviously, any answer to this question in a few thousand words must be highly selective. My choice encompasses three topics of particular political economic import. I choose (1) the distribution of the population; (2) urbanisation and migration; and (3) population growth and economic development.Distribution of the World’s Population
Something of the structure of the world’s population at present is described in Table 3.1
eBook - ePubRunning the Numbers: A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis: 2014
A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis
- John Quinterno(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Analysts therefore approach populations as a whole and study them with tools taken from demography, a statistical field concerned with understanding population size, change, and composition or characteristics. To help regional leaders understand demographic concepts and tools, this chapter begins by differentiating demography from Demographics and then describes important sources of demographic information, especially the American Community Survey, an annual product of the U.S. Census Bureau. The chapter concludes by explaining four essential demographic concepts: population size, population change, population distribution, and population composition or characteristics. To illustrate the selected topics, the chapter offers practical examples drawn from data for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), a three-county region that had 3.5 million residents in 2011 (see Map 5.1). 3 Source: U.S. Office of Management and Budget, “Update of Statistical Area Definitions and Establishments (OMB Bulletin No. 10–02),” December 1, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/bulletins/b10-02.pdf
eBook - ePub- Martyn Barrett, Dimitra Pachi(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
This review of demographic factors reveals that there are widespread differences in young people’s civic and political engagement as a function of their SES, gender and ethnicity. However, the differences that have been found are by no means either universal or consistent. Furthermore, the differences that are linked to demographic categories are complex, with patterns of engagement sometimes being specific to particular subgroups defined in terms of the intersection between two or more demographic categories (e.g., specific to girls of a particular age with particular ethnic affiliations who are living in a particular locale in a particular country). The picture that emerges from this body of research is that the lives of young people show enormous heterogeneity as a function of SES, gender, ethnicity, locale and national context, and their civic and political interests and concerns inevitably vary accordingly. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that their patterns of civic and political engagement and participation vary as well and are often specific to the particular demographic niches which they occupy.ConclusionsIn this chapter, we have reviewed the research literature on the social and demographic factors that are related to young people’s civic and political engagement. As we have seen, there are many social factors linked to youth engagement and participation, as well as considerable demographic variation in patterns of youth engagement and participation. While the research that has been conducted to date has undoubtedly been extremely informative about both social and demographic factors, there are several issues that would benefit from further research.For example, although there has been a great deal of research into the role of the family, the school and youth organisations, there has been far less research into the role of the mass media. For example, little attention has been paid to the effects of young people’s consumption of news and current affairs from different types of mass media outlets (e.g., broadsheet newspapers and public service television news vs. tabloid newspapers and commercial television news) or the effects of their consumption of entertainment, commercial advertising and political advertising on their civic and political engagement. The phenomenon of media malaise and the concept of a virtuous circle, as well as the possibility that different effects might arise from different types of media content, need much more extensive investigation in relationship to young people than has been undertaken to date.
eBook - ePub- Danny Dorling, Stuart Gietel-Basten(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
In the US, university fees influence migration patterns as they are less for in-state students whose other costs (such as housing) are often also lower than for those who cross state boundaries. In the UK, were it not for students migrating to study from the rest of Europe, then university student numbers in England would have fallen in recent years (they are expected to fall in the next few years). Part of the reason more students come to the UK than travel out to study is because UK universities advertise themselves so widely. Another reason is the EU free-movement-of-study regulations, which give everyone in the EU the right to come to the UK and take out a student loan (at least for as long as the UK remains a member of the EU or negotiates some new agreement). Student loan repayments can only be forcibly extracted from adults working within the UK. Thus the UK may have been attractive to overseas EU students who think that they might never have to pay the loan back.Migration is the most politically contentious area of demography because it involves ideas of what is fair and unfair in relation to people who are often considered to be undeserving strangers. We will return to this issue later in this chapter, but political influences on fertility and mortality affect demography just as much.Cultural identity, nationalism and population decline
The map in Figure 8.6 shows those countries that were experiencing natural population decline in 2002 with the area of each country drawn in proportion to the size of that decline. Russia is huge as it had so few births and so many deaths in that year. Eastern Europe is large and Western Europe is smaller with many countries, such as the UK, experiencing natural population growth then (and still today).Detailed population statistics of the kind used to produce Figure 8.6 are a relatively recent invention because the political imperative to produce them has only recently been established, along with the resources needed to collect them. Collecting migration data, however, has historically been even more difficult. It began with a British statistician, William Farr, who worked in the Registrar General’s Office for England and Wales from 1838 to 1879, and was responsible for the collection of official medical statistics. He established the first system for routinely recording causes of death alongside occupation, and was a Commissioner for the 1871 census. His observation that migration appeared to occur almost without any definite law probably related to the apparently random fluctuations in the trend of annual net migration: calculated as the misfit between counts of births, deaths and actual population changes in an area over time, it does not involve knowing the separate in- and out-migration data. Bearing in mind that Farr would have only observed the first few decades of the 160-year time series shown in Figure 8.7
