Young voters are underrepresented in legislatures and governments around the world. Still, most research addressing this topic focuses on descriptive, rather than substantive representation, pointing to the low number of representatives or candidates variously defined as “young”. Instead, this paper assesses to what extent political elites take up the issue priorities of the youth.  

Specifically, we study legislative debates to capture representativeness in the parliamentary arena, beyond electoral pledges or party manifestos. We retrieve party issue emphasis through the ParlEE corpus of plenary speeches in the legislative chambers of 28 European countries (2009-2019). We then match it with young voters’ priorities from Eurobarometer, to measure our outcome of interest: issue congruence between parties in parliament and voters below the age of 30.

We examine three factors that we expect to increase the congruence between young voters and elected representatives. First, the electoral system, as more proportional systems can improve the representation of specific groups such as women, minorities, or low-income citizens. Second, the share of young citizens among the party’s voting base (taken from the ESS), since we can expect parties to respond to their own supporters. Third, the age composition of the legislature, to explicitly test the connection between descriptive and substantive representation (from the WARP dataset). 

By showing to what extent and under what conditions political elites represent the priorities of young voters, this paper contributes to research on the underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups' preferences and the factors that could help mitigate it.