A recent study co-written by Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Dr Mathis Ebbinghaus suggests that social movements can significantly impact life-course dynamics.
Previous studies on the outcomes of social movements have mainly focused on the policy and cultural impacts rather than demographic consequences.
This paper addresses this shortcoming by exploring the demographic impacts of local protest in Ethiopia – a country currently undergoing a fertility transition.
The study reveals that exposure to protests delays the formation of first marriages in Ethiopia.
Published in Social Forces, the study links the marriage histories of over 4,300 women aged 15-24 to georeferenced data on local protests from 2002 to 2016.
Ethiopia, a country with a youthful population and an average age of 18.8 years, has traditionally seen many women marry before their eighteenth birthday.
The country has also seen numerous anti-government protests over recent years. Significant spikes occurred in 2005, 2011 and 2014, when mass protests about democratic accountability, religious freedom, and the forced displacement of peoples spread nationwide.
The authors argue that these protests preoccupied large segments of the marriageable population, making them unavailable for marriage, and therefore increasing the average age of marriage across the country.
Protest participation and its all-consuming impact on protest audiences can reduce the availability of time and energy for marriage, leading to delays in marriage formation at the height of mass protest.
The study rules out two other potential explanations for delayed marriage: political uncertainty (which may lead people to postpone life events) and increased interethnic tensions (which would reduce interethnic marriages).
The paper concludes:
Since 2010, the number of protest events across the world has substantially increased, an increase particularly pronounced in low- and middle-income countries.
This surge in protests unfolds amidst the fertility transition in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is in part driven by increases in the age at first marriage.
Understanding the implications of these trends for population dynamics calls for concerted efforts from both social movement scholars and demographers.
