The radical youth? Studying Issue Congruence between Youth Politicians, Parliamentary Candidates and Voters in Norway

There is a growing body of literature focusing on youth parties as these organisations have crucial roles linking young people to established political parties (Bruter & Harrison 2009; de Roon 2020; Hooghe and Stolle 2005). Important functions of youth parties include recruiting, training and socializing new members and future political leaders (Rainsford 2018). Youth parties are said to be more radical than their mother parties (Weber 2017). They articulate their party ideology clearer and present more radical policy proposals. However, youth party elites can have aspirations of a future political career and therefor may want to adjust their attitudes to be able to climb the ladder in politics. There might therefore be similarities on policy issues between youth party elites and parent party elites. There is a well-established literature on issue congruence between politicians and those they represent, such as voters and party elites (Valen & Narud 2007) and citizens and European Parliament candidates (Dalton 2017). Several studies also focus on different party strata (Allern, Heidar and Karlsen 2015; Kölln and Polk 2017, Van Holsteyn, Ridder and Koole 2015). However, few studies have in fact directly compared the political attitudes and opinions of youth politicians with those of their parent party or the electorate. In this article we therefore ask: Are youth party elites more radical than are party elites and voters? To answer this question, we study issue-congruence between the three levels of political parties drawing on three surveys to different types of actors in Norway: youth elite politicians (The Norwegian Youth Party) , parliamentary candidates (the Norwegian Candidate Survey), and voters (the Norwegian Election Study). To test issue-congruence, we zoom in on essential issue dimensions in contemporary politics: the general ideological left-right-scale as well as the contested issue dimensions climate, immigration and centre-periphery.