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Young Faces, Youth Voices? Representation by Young Politicians in the French, Italian, Polish, and European Parliaments
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Abstract: While scholarly attention to the descriptive representation of young people in legislative bodies has increased, considerably less is known about the behaviours of young representatives in parliaments and the extent to which they engage with issues relevant to other young people. Against this background, we focus on the discursive practices of young elected politicians in parliaments and explore how they represent youth in their speeches. Beyond mere descriptive representation, this article analyses the substantive representation of young people by young political actors in parliamentary fora. To explore the complex dynamics of youth representation in parliaments, we employed a conceptual framework based on a representative claims analysis of young members of parliaments supplemented by semi-structured interviews with them. This article is based on data from the French, Italian, Polish, and European parliaments. It demonstrates that structural factors, especially party competition, hinder the ways in which young parliamentarians represent fellow young people. In addition, in contrast to other permanent features such as gender, (young) age is only partially relevant to structuring the representation choices of members of parliament.
Keywords: democracy; European Union; parliaments; representation; youth
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Vol 14 (2026): The Representative Disconnect in Contemporary European Democracies (In Progress)
© Elodie Thevenin, Magdalena Góra, Katarzyna Zielińska, Małgorzata Maria Fijał. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.