Political demography: Powerful forces between disciplinary stools

The interconnections between politics and the dramatic demographic changes underway around the world have been under-attended by the two research disciplines that could contribute most to their understanding: demography and political science. Instead this area of “political demography†has largely been ceded to political activists, pundits and journalists, leading to often exaggerated or garbled interpretation. The terrain includes issues that now rank among the most politically sensitive and contested in many parts of the world, engaging high-level attention including that of numerous presidents and premiers: alleged demographically-determined shifts in the international balance of power; low fertility, population aging, and the sustainability of public pension and other age-related systems; international migration; national identity; compositional shifts in politically sensitive social categories (ethnic/religious/racial/linguistic/national origin); and human rights. Moreover it now is apparent that many governments (and nongovernmental actors too) have actively been pursuing varieties of “strategic demography†, in which one or more of the three key demographic drivers (fertility, mortality, migration) have been deployed—consciously if not always explicitly—as instruments of their domestic or international strategies. The prospects for the coming decades seem to be for more of the same, and it would well behoove political scientists and demographers to employ their considerable knowledge and analytic techniques in ways that could improve public understanding and moderate the excessive claims and fears that prevail.