Gatekeepers or Supporters? Political Parties and Youth Representation

Abstract

Research on group representation has mostly focused on gender, economic or professional background (class) and more recently ethnic minorities. Despite reference to age as a potential category of marginalization that can affect representational outcomes (Young 1989, Norris and Lovenduski 1995), it remains under researched. This could be the result of age-based norms around representation, or that the underrepresentation of certain age groups is viewed as less harmful to democratic representation than other categories like gender, or race/ethnicity; unlike these categories, young/middle/old age is not a static part of one’s identity; those who are young now, will one day automatically be part of the older share of society. Youth’s lack of representation in political institutions has thus been under-problematized. Yet, as the effects of societal aging in industrialized countries are becoming more evident and the potential for intergenerational conflict has gained more attention, scholars and practitioners have started to see age as a potentially important social cleavage. Research on the underrepresentation of youth in parliaments has so far focused on the intersection of age and gender (Belschner and Garcia de Paredes, 2021; Joshi and Och, 2021; Stockemer and Sundström, 2022), institutional effects of electoral systems, age requirements, or quotas (Belschner and Garcia de Paredes, 2021; Joshi, 2013; Krook and Nugent, 2018; Stockemer and Sundström, 2018, 2019, 2022) and voter preferences (Belschner, 2022; Eshima and Smith, 2022) but only rarely on societal context factors (Stockemer and Sundström, 2019) or political parties (Stockemer and Sundström, 2022). This is quite astonishing as parties are central in the selection of candidates and ultimately, in determining the demographic composition of elected politicians. Parties’ influence on this composition has been shown for other characteristics such as gender (Norris and Lovenduski, 1995; Caul, 1999) and the representation of racial/ethnic minorities (Schönwälder, 2013), but rarely on the age composition of parliaments (see Stockemer and Sundström 2022; Sundström and Stockemer 2018).This panel aims to bring together a growing body of scholarship on youth representation focusing on parties as the main actors in candidate selection.

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