Externe Publikationen

African youth and the future of democracy

Nkansah, Godfred Bonnah / Christine Hackenesch
Externe Publikationen (2025)

in: Megatrends Afrika Working Paper 12

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18449/2025MTA-WP20
Open access

African youth will be key in shaping the future of African politics. Recent political events such as the Gen-Z protests in Kenya, and political transitions in Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere have demonstrated that young people are at the forefront of political protests. African democracies can only be consolidated if young African citizens are supportive of democracy and regularly engage in elections and other formal democratic processes. Yet, we still know little about the political attitudes and behaviour of African youth and the factors shaping young citizens’ political outlooks. We propose a novel approach to address this gap by analysing how structural and individual-level factors independently and jointly influence the political attitudes and behaviour of African youth. More precisely, we explore to what extent youth bulge, urbanization and social media usage affect the political expression of African youth. Using Afrobarometer survey data for 41 countries gathered between 2016 and 2023, complemented by contextual data from international sources, we conduct a multilevel binary logistic regression analysis to explore how youth bulge, urbanization, and social media usage affect young Africans’ support for democracy, the willingness to vote, and participation in protests. Our analysis suggests that, individually, youth bulge, urbanization, and social media usage significantly influence the political attitudes and behaviour of African youth. We also explore the interaction between those factors, but most of these effects are not significant. This might be related to the relatively short timeframe for which the data is available.