{"title":"Too young to win? Exploring the sources of age-related electoral disadvantage","authors":"Jana Belschner","doi":"10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102748","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Young people continue to be underrepresented in formal politics. Previous research indicates that being a non-middle-aged candidate negatively affects electoral success. What are the origins of this performance gap? This article explores three potential sources of age-related disadvantage: Party affiliation, individual resources, and direct party and voter support. Drawing on data from 21 OECD countries, I show, first, that many age-related disadvantages take a non-linear shape. Both young and senior candidates run for smaller, poorer, and more marginal parties. They spend significantly less money on their campaigns than middle-aged competitors, and young candidates furthermore lack political experience. Young and senior candidates are placed on lower list positions in party-centred electoral systems and receive fewer preference votes in candidate-centred systems. Thus, both parties and voters fail to effectively counter structural age-disadvantages. This article contributes to our understanding of the shape and origins of age-related electoral disadvantages and illustrates the multifaceted reasons for youth's continued political under-representation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48188,"journal":{"name":"Electoral Studies","volume":"88 ","pages":"Article 102748"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424000064/pdfft?md5=1284ff62a6db1daa6023bdceca580a8a&pid=1-s2.0-S0261379424000064-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Electoral Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424000064","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Young people continue to be underrepresented in formal politics. Previous research indicates that being a non-middle-aged candidate negatively affects electoral success. What are the origins of this performance gap? This article explores three potential sources of age-related disadvantage: Party affiliation, individual resources, and direct party and voter support. Drawing on data from 21 OECD countries, I show, first, that many age-related disadvantages take a non-linear shape. Both young and senior candidates run for smaller, poorer, and more marginal parties. They spend significantly less money on their campaigns than middle-aged competitors, and young candidates furthermore lack political experience. Young and senior candidates are placed on lower list positions in party-centred electoral systems and receive fewer preference votes in candidate-centred systems. Thus, both parties and voters fail to effectively counter structural age-disadvantages. This article contributes to our understanding of the shape and origins of age-related electoral disadvantages and illustrates the multifaceted reasons for youth's continued political under-representation.
期刊介绍：
Electoral Studies is an international journal covering all aspects of voting, the central act in the democratic process. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, game theorists, geographers, contemporary historians and lawyers have common, and overlapping, interests in what causes voters to act as they do, and the consequences. Electoral Studies provides a forum for these diverse approaches. It publishes fully refereed papers, both theoretical and empirical, on such topics as relationships between votes and seats, and between election outcomes and politicians reactions; historical, sociological, or geographical correlates of voting behaviour; rational choice analysis of political acts, and critiques of such analyses.
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