Taming the Unruly: The Adoption of Youth Quotas after the ‘Arab Spring’

The adoption of electoral youth quotas has been an increasingly prominent policy in the ‘Global South’. Why do states adopt youth quotas – preferably during political transitions and always in tandem with gender quotas? This study empirically traces gender and youth quota adoption in Tunisia and Morocco after the uprisings of the ‘Arab spring’. It investigates four causal paths to quota adoption by comparing actors and factors within and across cases. The findings suggest that the gender quotas were a core demand of the domestic women’s movements and enjoyed strong international support. In contrast, the youth quotas have been initiatives of the domestic political elites. Designed as symbolic policies, they should distract from the primarily socio-economic demands of the revolutionary youth and ‘tame’ the unruly.