Youth Advantage Versus Gender Penalty: Selecting and Electing Young Candidates

• Author: Jana Belschner
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211072559
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(1) 90–106

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211072559

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Youth Advantage Versus Gender Penalty:

Selecting and Electing Young Candidates

Jana Belschner

Abstract

Young people are under-represented in formal politics. While this may be a mere projection of their lack among voters

and party members, the article investigates whether being young is a disadvantage in election processes, and if age effects

differ by gender. Bridging the literature on gender & politics and political behavior, the article draws on an innovative

sequential mixed-method design. Studying the 2019 Irish local elections, it uses 33 interviews to build hypotheses, which

are subsequently tested on an original candidate-level dataset (n= 1884). The f‌indings suggest that, when controlling for

party aff‌iliation and political status, being young can provide a net electoral advantage to male candidates. In contrast,

young female candidates appear to be advantaged by their age but penalized by their gender. The article thus contributes

to our understanding about the conditions right at the start of political careers and the emergence of intersectional

representational inequalities.

Keywords

candidate, elections, political parties, representation, voting, youth

Introduction

All over the world, young

1

men and women are under-

represented in institutionalized politics (Fisher 2012): As

voters, party members, and elected politicians alike.

Whereas there is an abundant literature on the causes and

consequences of young peoples’political participation,as

voters (Albacete2014;Grasso 2016;Henn, Weinstein, and

Forrest 2005) and party members (Bruter and Harrison

2009a,2009b;Hooghe, Stolle, and Stouthuysen 2004;

Sloam 2012), less is known about their political repre-

sentation andtheir access to political off‌ice. Is being young

adisadvantagewhenrunningforelection?

While gendered patterns of political over- and under-

representation have been extensively studied, research on

youth representation is only emerging (Joshi 2012;Joshi

and Och 2014;Sundstr¨

om and Stockemer2021;Stockemer

and Sundstr¨

om 2019a). Existing studies have, so far,

focused on describing and explaining cross-national

differences in the descriptive representation of youth

(Belschner 2021;IPU 2018), emphasizing the inter-

section of gender- and age-based representational in-

equalities (Belschner and Paredes 2021;Stockemer and

Sundstr¨

om 2019a,2019b). These studies conf‌irm that

youth are under-represented in politics worldwide—

young women in particular—and that the degree of

under-representation varies by electoral system, voting

age, and party factors.

Yet the electoral dynamics explaining these patterns

remain unexplored. Since, in general, few young people

decide to run for election, their political under-

representation may be a mere projection of this fact,

thus, a supply-side issue. On the other hand, young

candidates could be facing structural barriers on the

demand-side of the electoral process, related to parties’

selection practices and voters’election preferences

(Norris and Lovenduski 1995). Furthermore, the effects

of being young may be gendered and differ for young

male and female candidates. To date, there are few

studies that analyze the intersectional effects of age and

gender on electoral performance (but see Segaard and

Saglie 2021). This article aims to address this gap by

investigating the following question: How do candidate

Department of Comparative Politics, Christian Michelsens Institute,

University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Corresponding Author:

Jana Belschner, Department of Comparative Politics, Christian

Michelsens Institute, University of Bergen, Christies Gate 15,

Jekteviksbakken 31, Bergen 5007, Norway.

Email: jana.belschner@cmi.no

age and gender condition candidate selection and elec-

toral performance?

It draws on an analysis of the 2019 local elections in the

Republic of Ireland (hereafter: Ireland). The D´

ail ´

Eireann,

Ireland’s lower house of parliament, exhibits one of the

lowest shares of young and female MPs in Western Eu-

rope: 12.6% of all Irish MPs are young men under

41 years of age; 3.3% are young women. This lack of

diversity in the political system tends to be attributed to

Ireland’s conservative (party) culture and the features of

its electoral system (Galligan and Knight 2011;McGing

2013). Ireland employs the PR-STV system (Proportional

Representation with Single Transferable Vote), which

allows voters to express preferences for individual can-

didates within those pre-selected by the political parties.

PR-STV is counted among the most personalized electoral

systems (McElroy and Marsh 2010).

The article’s focus on Irish local elections is motivated

by three aspect s. First, the unique setup of PR-STV en-

ables the researcher to assess and compare both party and

voter behavior, that is, candidate selection and election.

These two main demand-side-related effects for repre-

sentational outcomes are notoriously diff‌icult to disen-

tangle empirically, which is why most studies on electoral

behavior focus on either one of them (Doherty, Dowling,

and Miller 2019;Marien, Schouteden, and Wauters 2017;

McGregor et al. 2017). Second, local politics is often the

f‌irst step of a political career and thus a suitable site to

study the conditions for young candidates’electoral

performance (Cirone, Cox, and Fiva 2021;Buckley and

Hofman 2015;Buckley et al. 2015;Fortin-Rittberger et al.

2019). Third, as illustrated above, Ireland represents a

most likely case for the existence of demand-side-related

barriers to young peoples’political representation. As

such, it allows us to assess the scope conditions under

which one would expect to f‌ind these barriers also be-

yond the specif‌ic Irish case. If they are not present in

Ireland, they are unlikely to occur in most other com-

parable settings.

The article uses an innovative sequential mixed-

methods design that swaps the classical order of steps

in a multi-method analysis. Instead of using quantitative

data to f‌ind correlations that are then explained by

qualitative data, I start by analyzing 33 explorative in-

terviews with young party members, local councilors, and

election candidates. This is done to identify relevant

variables and possible mediation and interaction (mod-

eration) effects, which are then tested quantitatively. This

procedure is motivated by the fact that literature on the

role of age in electoral processes is relatively scant and, if

we assume that intersectional effects may differ from the

simple sum of separate age and gender effects, not suf-

f‌icient to formulate specif‌ic expectations regarding in-

tersectional dynamics in electoral processes.

Specif‌ically, the interviewees rejected the idea of a

discriminatory bias against young candidates among ei-

ther party elites or voters. Instead, they identif‌ied three

relevant variables expected to mediate (Baron and Kenny

1986) the effects of candidate age and gender on perfor-

mance in selectionand election processes: party aff‌iliation,

political status, and dynastic relations.

2

These variables

were then collected foran original dataset of an almost full

sample of the 2019local election candidates (n=1884)that

was used to test the hypotheses quantitatively.

In terms of selection effects, the data show that young

candidates tend to run for smaller and younger parties that

win fewer seats in total. Furthermore, parties prefer

candidates with high political status—this correlates with

being male and middle-aged. Third, parties preferably

select young candidates with ties to political dynasties. In

terms of election effects, a series of multivariate regres-

sions conf‌irm that a good proportion of young candidates’

weaker electoral performance can be attributed to these

systematic differences in party aff‌iliation and lower levels

of political status. Both electoral disadvantages hit young

women harder. Specif‌ically, voters seem to prefer young men

for their f‌irst preference votes. In contrast, young women

appear to be “second-choice candidates,”over-proportionally

prof‌iting from lower order preference votes. At the same

time, the dataconf‌irm that neither parties nor votersseem to

exhibit systematicbiases against young candidatesbecause

of their age, and that voters even prefer young men over

middle-aged men, ceteris paribus.

The article therefore concludes that, in candidate-

centered elections, young women are advantaged by

their age (compared to middle-aged women) but pe-

nalized by their gender (compared to young men).

Furthermore, it argues that future research should focus

on investigating the intersectional age- and gender ef-

fects of supply-side factors on representation, and for

instance explore why fewer young female party members

decide to run for election.

Literature Review: Candidate Age and Gender in

Electoral Processes

For a long time, research into “youth and politics”was

almost exclusively dedicated to researching young peo-

ples’(lack of) political participation. Recently, however,

the presence—or absence—of young adults in political

bodies has become a topic on the research agenda of

comparative politics. So far, most work focused on de-

f‌ining “youth”in political representation (Sundstr ¨

om and

Stockemer 2021), as well as on describing and explaining

which factors condition higher or lower levels of young

people in parliaments (Stockemer and Sundstr ¨

om 2020;

Joshi 2015) and governments (Stockemer and Sundstr ¨

om

2021). In their seminal work, Stockemer and Sundstr ¨

om

Belschner 91