Contemporary democracies and the inclusion of young people. Interdisciplinary insights from youth studies on electoral reforms and minimum voting age.

The political inclusion of young people is one of the main challenges of contemporary democracies worldwide. Particularly, in regions that experienced transitions to democratic regimes in their recent history, such as Latin America and the Caribbean, this is a central subject. One of the ideas to address this issue in several countries in different regions of the world, is lowering the minimum voting age. Some countries such as Austria lowered to 16 years in 2007, Brazil in 1988, Ecuador in 2008 or Argentina in 2012. In other countries, proposals of reform have been or are discussed by political leaders. The subject is also part of recent social science research, particularly in Europe, with scholarship more centered on national case studies or wider global comparisons, particularly on the effects of these reforms. The central objective of my current research is to study the drivers of voting age electoral reforms in LAC region since the democratization processes to the present from a broad comparative perspective. In this paper I will present my research and discuss the challenges and limitations for developing an interdisciplinary framework at the crossroads of youth studies, sociology, political science and history to advance on the study of contemporary democracies. Considering the idea that the positions of political actors are oriented both by strategic considerations regarding their political survival and narratives and agendas on the role of young people, I will analyze the potentialities of intersecting concepts from the field of comparative politics such as electoral reforms, with notions from the sociology and history of youth. To this extent I propose that age, considered as a political, social, cultural and historical category, is a powerful concept to address the interdisciplinary study of democracies. During my presentation I will discuss a) the challenges to interdisciplinarity in the empirical and comparative study of the political inclusion/representation of young people in contemporary democracies; b) the need for complex theoretical-methodological research frameworks that may be capable of including but going beyond the procedural definitions of liberal democracy as we know it today.