Managing Election- Relation Violence for Democratic Stability in Ghana The theory states that countries with an increasingly large population of youth are more likely to be at risk of political violence. This is because such countries are likely to run into socio­economic problems such as resource scarcity, poverty, unemployment and under-employment, and rapid urbanization. These factors often predispose the youthful population to violence. Countries with weak political systems have also been noted as particularly vulnerable to such youth-related violence. The theory, which describes young people, especially those within 146 the age bracket of 15 to 24, as a historically volatile population, analyses historical data to establish a relationship between young adults and historical socio-political unrest. The presence of a large youth population in a context of poor socio-economic conditions has thus been identified as having played a key role in some historical revolutions and socio-political unrest. Recent studies on youth bulges and conflicts point out that countries(mainly developing ones) that have young people making up more than 35 percent of the adult population have a 150 percent higher risk of armed conflict(Urdal, 2012:7). A country's risk of conflict also increases by more than 4 percent with every percentage point increase in the youth population, relative to the adult population. This means the higher the youth population(as a proportion of the total adult population) of a country, the higher its risk of political violence. Following the theory, concerns about population growth should rather focus on the nature of demographic characteristics instead of the sheer total popualtion size and rate of increase. One viewpoint about the theory is that youth bulges do not necessarily always mean negative consequences. It has been argued that continued investments 146 Other writers also use the age bracket 15-29 in their discussion of the youth bulge. 311