Issue Priorities of the Young and Old: Contrasting Age Differences in Public Opinion and MPs’ Behavior

Across advanced democracies, parliamentarians tend to be older than the overall electorate, to the detriment of younger age groups. Compared to other dimensions of representational inequality, however, knowledge about potential consequences of young voters’ descriptive underrepresentation is still relatively limited. The present study addresses this gap by investigating the extent to which age differences in voters’ policy preferences translate into behavioral differences among elected representatives from different age groups. Apart from younger voters holding different issue positions than older voters, a rarely tested assumption in the literature holds that they also prioritize these issues differently. Drawing on Germany as empirical case, the study investigates group differences in the mentions of different issues as "Most Important Problem" in national opinion surveys and examines whether members of parliament (MPs) are more likely to address the issues that their own age group perceives as more important in parliamentary speeches from 2009 to 2019. By empirically identifying differences in issue priorities between age groups and tracing how MPs engage with these issues, this study thus contributes to the ongoing debate on the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation in the context of ageing populations and rising salience of inter-generationally conflictive issues.