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E-book Global Political Demography : The Politics of Population Change
Political demography, or the systematic study of population changeand politics, public policies and polities, sees population dynamics (struc-ture and change) as one of the main drivers of politics at the meso-and macro-level. As an approach, it can be defined as the study of thedynamics in the size, composition and distribution of populations andtheir effects on political and policy processes.1As such, rare exceptionsnotwithstanding (Goldstone et al.,2012; Teitelbaum,2015; Vanhuysse&Goerres,2012; Weiner & Teitelbaum,2001), political demographyis still a surprisingly marginal discipline, both within demography andwithin political science with no major research networks, loose or institu-tionalized, or standard works of reference. And yet, ‘the human tide’ ofever-shifting and changing population trends has been a key shaper of thepolitical and sociological outlines of the world we inhabit today (Dorling& Gietel-Basten,2018; Morland,2019). Indeed, however widespreadit still may be, the very idea of analysing populations and politicssepa-ratelyseems futile. As Robbins and Smith (2017: 212) put it, “[t]hereis a close relationship between observations of births, deaths, and fertilityand normative urges to govern these same things: population research ispolitical research". This book posits that it is both timely and fruitful to adopt a polit-ical demography lens as an analytical window on our fast-changing world.We try to do so by bringing together a truly global group of scholarsfrom area studies, demography, economics, geography, political scienceand sociology, to trace and think through political and policy processesof demographic trends in the macro-region of their expertise, under theeditorial guidance of two died-in-the-wool political scientists. Our aimsare, first and foremost, descriptive: to track, synthesize and summarize thekey demographic developments across these large macro-regions between1990 and 2040. Then, in a second instance, we aim to theorize, some-times speculate, about the domestic and intra-regional political and policyrepercussions of these developments.
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