Political Demography and Latin America

Today I was the guest on Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, which is hosted by Dr. Gregory Weeks, Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Carolina, Charlotte. Greg has always been like a son to me since, of course, he IS my son. Not surprisingly, we talked about political demography, which he and I have been working on together for several years. Today we talked especially about Colombia, Venezuela and Cuba. Enjoy!

Is Demography Connected to the Colombian Peace Deal?

A new peace deal was signed in Colombia a few days ago between the government and the FARC rebel group. As BBC News notes, "The deal is aimed at ending five decades of armed conflict, which has killed more than 260,000 people and left millions internally displaced." That's a lot of deaths, to be sure, but 50 years ago Colombia had a population of 19 million, and today it has 48 million. Fifty years ago, the average woman was having 6.2 children each and today she is having 1.8 each. Fifty years ago, almost 60 percent of the population was under age 20, and today it is down to one-third. In other words, Colombia is a very different country today than it was 50 years ago, and demographic change is front and center in the country's transition.

I thought about these things this week as I read an interesting research article just published in Demographic Research by Ewa Batyra, a demography PhD student at the London School of Economics. Her focus was on the change in timing of childbearing in Colombia as a way of helping to understand the dramatic drop in fertility over time in that country. Her analysis is largely based on the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey in Colombia, at which time fertility had dropped to just replacement level. It has since dipped below replacement level. Why? As is true throughout much of the world, education is a key. The better educated a woman is, the later she is to start childbearing or, if she had a child early (as is still frustratingly common throughout parts of Latin America), the more likely she is to delay the second one.

So, in the 50 years since FARC got going, the excess supply of unemployed young men has diminished, and men and women have been staying in school longer, leading to new perspectives on life, including perspectives on family and, almost certainly, on the value of rebellion and illegal activity. Over those years, the per person gross national income (in current US dollars) has risen from $300 per year to $7,130, according to World Bank data. 

You might well say that correlation is not causation and that I am ignoring a lot of the messiness associated with the peace deal, but I would argue that Colombia's way forward (and it is definitely forward) is grounded thoroughly in the demographics of reduced family size and a heightened status of women. The need for rebellion is gone, and it was time to make peace. 

Venezuelans on the Move

It was bound to happen. You can't have a country whose economy is collapsing, as in Venezuela, and not expect that some people will try to get out. Today's NYTimes has a lengthy article detailing the plight of several people trying to get to the island of Curaçao by boat. From shore to shore it is about 40 miles in distance, but of course that's not an easy trip for small smuggling boats. And the island is home to only about 150,000 people, so it is not in a good position to be receiving new migrants.

Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s richest countries, flush with oil wealth that attracted immigrants from places as varied as Europe and the Middle East.

But after President Hugo Chávez vowed to break the country’s economic elite and redistribute wealth to the poor, the rich and middle class fled to more welcoming countries in droves, creating what demographers describe as Venezuela’s first diaspora.

Now a second diaspora is underway — much less wealthy and not nearly as welcome.

Well over 150,000 Venezuelans have fled the country in the last year alone, the highest in more than a decade, according to scholars studying the exodus.

I have not been able yet to track down the source of those numbers, but the story points out that Venezuelans are also trying to get into Brazil (whose economic situation has also deteriorated lately), as well as into Colombia. 

A cynical view of this would be that President Maduro of Venezuela might be happy to see people go, since that could take some pressure off the limited supply of food in the country.

Federal Court Pushes Back Against Gerrymandering in Wisconsin

Federal judges in Wisconsin have ruled that the gerrymandering of State Assembly districts in that state unfairly benefitted Republicans. Keep in mind that redistricting of Congressional Districts is mandated by the U.S. Constitution and this is the formal reason for having a census of population in the United States. State legislatures and local jurisdictions also redistrict after each census. Indeed, my wife (a former elected official) was a member of the San Diego County Redistricting Advisory Committee here in San Diego County after the 2010 census. The Supreme Court has ruled in recent years that race is the primary reason for challenging the redrawn boundaries, but in Wisconsin, political parties were at stake, rather than race, per se, as the NYTimes notes:

A panel of three federal judges said on Monday that the Wisconsin Legislature’s 2011 redrawing of State Assembly districts to favor Republicans was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the first such ruling in three decades of pitched legal battles over the issue.

Federal courts have struck down gerrymanders on racial grounds, but not on grounds that they unfairly give advantage to a political party — the more common form of gerrymandering. The case could now go directly to the Supreme Court, where its fate may rest with a single justice, Anthony M. Kennedy, who has expressed a willingness to strike down partisan gerrymanders but has yet to accept a rationale for it.

In Monday’s ruling, the court was swayed by a new and simple mathematical formula to measure the extent of partisan gerrymandering, called the efficiency gap. The formula divides the difference between the two parties’ “wasted votes” — votes beyond those needed by a winning side, and votes cast by a losing side — by the total number of votes cast. When both parties waste the same number of votes, the result is zero — an ideal solution. But as a winning party wastes fewer and fewer votes than its opponent, its score rises.

The case will automatically go to the Supreme Court and we will have to watch this carefully, since gerrymandering for clearly political purposes was undertaken by many states after the 2010 census because Republicans won a lot of seats that year both in Congress and in state legislatures. Since the latter groups still draw the boundaries in a majority of states, this has almost certainly influenced politics in America, as things suggested they would back in 2011 as redistricting was taking place throughout the country. If boundaries are required to change in ways so that one party is clearly not benefitting more than another, this could affect elections in 2018 and 2020, which could then influence how the 2020 census data will be used for redistricting.

The Demography of Dementia

With aging comes dementia. Maybe not to you personally (hopefully!) but at the population level, your chances of dementia increase with age. But how quickly do those odds increase? A new report out in JAMA Internal Medicine offers a bit of good news, if there is such a thing when it comes to dementia. You can read the whole article on your own, but today's NYTimes offers a summary.

Despite fears that dementia rates were going to explode as the population grows older and fatter, and has more diabetesand high blood pressure, a large nationally representative survey has found the reverse. Dementia is actually on the wane. And when people do get dementia, they get it at older and older ages.

The new study found that the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8.8 percent in 2012 from 11.6 percent in 2000. That trend is “statistically significant and impressive,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania [and a Past President of the Population Association of America] who was not associated with the study.

In 2000, people received a diagnosis of dementia at an average age of 80.7; in 2012, the average age was 82.4.

Keep in mind that this is a good new/bad news sort of story. The good news is that the rate of dementia is going down and is hitting at later ages. The bad news is that given the size of the baby boomer population coming into the older ages, that rate is going to have to go down a lot more to ward off a huge national increase in the number of older people with dementia. Nature had a lengthy story recently that details some of those numbers and the fact that we have not yet put nearly enough money or effort into preventing and combatting dementia.

Voluntarily or not, people will need to face up to dementia, because in just a few short decades, pretty much everyone is going to have a friend or loved one affected by the disease. It’s an alarming idea, and it should spur action, says Robert Egge, chief public policy officer of the Alzheimer’s Association in Chicago, Illinois.

So, we can't let the good news from today's research keep us from pressing on with more work on dementia.