Attitudes towards Democracy Post Arab-Spring: Age, Period, Cohort Analysis

Scholars across disciplines have long studied how age (A), period (P), and cohort (C) shape people’s attitudes, beliefs, and health conditions over time. In APC analysis, age refers to the individual’s biological age, period refers to the specific point in time during which the individual is observed, and cohort referring to an individual’s membership in a group defined by a birth year range. A major challenge in these studies is “the identification problem” - the perfect collinearity between these factors, as age = period – birth year (with cohort assignment being completely dependent on birth year). This relationship makes it impossible to simultaneously estimate the linear effects of all three variables. How do scholars address this issue?