Party youth wings as gatekeepers of youth candidate selection: Evidence from fifty years of parliamentary elections in Portugal

This article investigates the representation of young people in candidate selection in Portugal. I examine the role of party youth wings on selecting young people for eligible positions on the party list. There is extensive evidence that young people are underrepresented in conventional politics (e.g. Joshi 2013; Stockemer and Sundström 2022). Despite voters prefer young candidates (Eshima and Smith 2022; Roberts and Wolak 2022), young politicians face several barriers to surpass party gatekeepers (Stockemer and Sundström 2018; Stockemer et al. 2023). Parties favor older candidates (Gherghina and Chiru 2010), leading to a gerontocracy (Magni-Berton and Panel 2021). The inclusion of the youth in political institutions is important because they are the nursery of tomorrow’s leaders (Bruter and Harrison 2009; Ammassari et al. 2023). It has implications for voter preferences and government spending (McClean 2022). Younger MPs put more emphasis on the interests of the youth (Rentrop 2022) and call the attention of older deputies to youth-related issues (Borghetto et al. 2022). We know very little about how younger cohorts are represented in PR systems. Who is the principal in a centralized party system? This article seeks to understand the politics of youth candidate selection for party candidacies and the Portuguese legislature. The argument is that running in higher constituencies, belonging to a political dynasty, and being (first) appointed by a PYW increases the probability of young people to enter parliament. In addition, volunteering for a PYW should be a competitive advantage in building a political career (Hooghe et al. 2004; Ohmura et al. 2018; Binderkrantz et al. 2020). PYW are essential as a recruitment channel (de Roon 2020), allowing parties to identify and nurture future elected representatives, policy researchers or party organizers (Mycock and Tonge 2012, 7). While for parties this enables ‘showing off some new faces’ (Bruter and Harrison 2009, 1280), for young aspirants to career politicians, being a PYW members means being and remaining ‘better off’ (Hooghe et al. 2004, 196). Unlike most accounts – that focus on relatively short periods because of the painstaking data collection process – I leverage a unique micro-level dataset of all candidates to legislative elections for the entire democratic period. My large observation window allows to examine how the passage of election cycles provides information about youth candidate selection, allowing party leaders to make a reliable and effective screening process, as well as the decline of traditional parties and the rise of populist parties. Hence, I further analyze how and why prior PYW members move up or down the ladder of electoral lists between time t and time t+1. Portugal is a country of interest insofar as it is a most centralized unitary regime, which makes it a least-likely case concerning candidate inclusiveness. Unlike systems with some personalized component, which hollows out the importance of the candidate selection stage, the Portuguese closed-list PR system makes candidate selection a pivotal moment for representation and political careers.