Who Claims The/their Youth? An Intersectional Analysis of Representative Claims Made by Young (Female) Parliamentarians

Among the groups that remain underrepresented in European parliaments today are women (Coessens, 2024) and young people (Stockemer & Sundstrom, 2022). Of the few young members of parliament, aged 18-35, only a small minority are female. These young (female) MPs would according to traditional accounts best descriptively and substantively represent the interests of young people in society. But whether these MPs make such representative claims and how other intersecting underrepresented identities play a role remains unclear. This paper therefore asks: Which young MPs claim to represent young people in parliament? And how do claims about youth intersect with the representation of their other descriptive identities? To tackle this, this paper first analyses which young MPs actually makes claims about young people and youth interests. This is done through a representative claim analysis on all plenary parliamentary speeches made by young MPs (aged 18-35) in Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and Poland between July 2024 and March 2025. Secondly, through the qualitative inductive coding of those representative claims, the intersectional mobilisation of gender and age in the claims is studied. The original data and comparative design allows us to examine how claims on youth relate to the descriptive identity of the claim-maker in terms of gender, age, incumbency and party affiliation in the four parliaments and their different institutional contexts