Recruitment of young councillors: Driven by parties or voters?

Youth are generally under-represented in elected assemblies. In this paper, we aim to explore whether –and how – a lowering of the voting age to 16 years may affect the recruitment of young local councillors. We use data from the three latest local elections in Norway, held in 2007, 2011 and 2015. In both the 2015 and 2011 elections, 20 municipalities took part in a trial in which the voting age was lowered to 16 years. The under-representation of youth challenges political parties, as the main recruiters of candidates for election, to field young candidates, and preferably in positions that enhance their chances of getting elected. On the other hand, voters may also give precedence to younger candidates. So to what degree do parties and voters respectively give priority to young candidates at the ballot box? Our aim with this paper is to pursue these two demand-sided explanations in a local electoral setting; one emphasizing parties as agents for the enhancement of youth representation, the other highlighting the importance of voter preferences for young candidates’ likelihood of getting elected. Two contextual aspects are of significance for our study. First, the Norwegian local electoral system allows for both party and voter influence over the election of individual candidates. Parties may give precedence to a limited number of candidates on the list and voters may give preferential votes to specific candidates – but only after having stated a preference for a party list. Hence, the electoral systems allows for different configurations of party and voter influence over the election of individual candidates. Second, the trial allows for a quasi-experimental design where trial municipalities may be compared to non-trial municipalities. We assume that the question of youth representation will be particularly salient in the trial municipalities. Accordingly, in trial municipalities we expect parties and voters to have an extra incentive to further young candidatures. The analyses will be based on data on all list candidates fielded in these elections, as well as surveys of municipal party branch leaders carried out in 2011 and 2015.