Who cares for younger generations? An analysis of young people’s parliamentary representation in France and Italy

The representation of young people in parliaments has long interested political scientists because it constitutes an essential component of a fully-fledged democratic system. While much of existing scholarly work focuses on the underrepresentation of young people among MPs and elected officials, there is still a lot to be learned about their substantive representation. This paper aims at contributing to this debate by focusing on the extent, how and why parties use a classical tool such as parliamentary questions to explicitly cater to their younger constituencies. The empirical analysis provides a comparison of youth substantive representation in two countries, Italy and France, that feature, respectively, one of the oldest and youngest societies in advanced European democracies. To this end, the paper codes references to young people in the text of oral parliamentary questions spanning two countries and two decades. The comparative research design enables us to identify whether the salience of youth-related issues is affected by differences in parties’ ideologies and electoral agenda, voters’ age structure and age composition of the parliamentary group. By focusing on the causes of youth’s representation in parliament, this study sheds light on the dynamics of political representation and democratic quality, as well as the internal functioning of legislatures.