Gatekeeping Parties? - A QCA on youth representation in parliaments

Research on the underrepresentation of youth in parliaments has so far focused on the intersection of age and gender, institutional effects of electoral systems, age requirements or quotas and voter preferences - but only rarely on societal context factors or political parties. This is quite astonishing as parties are central in the selection of candidates and therefore should play an important role in determining the demographic composition of elected politicians. We built a dataset of ca. 90 party parliamentary groups in advanced democracies between 2017 and 2020 and conducted a fuzzy set QCA (fsQCA). Building upon previous literature, we take societal context factors into account as well as party characteristics and expect the share of young MPs to be higher under the following conditions: a proportional representation electoral system, low age requirements for candidacy, a low/high median age of the population, an inclusive/decentralized selectorate, strong party youth organizations and an inclusive party ideology. Preliminary results show that an inclusive ideology and a proportional representation electoral system lead to higher shares of young MPs. The role of youth organizations is ambivalent and needs further analysis. By following and applying the newest guidelines on good practices in QCA research, including different robustness checks we present one of the first applications of these in the contexts of party and representation research.